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October 2008                                                                                                   Volume 15 - Number 1

Perspectives...

“The October Surprise”

By Steven Duggan

When most people hear the words, “October surprise,” they conjure up thoughts of damaging revelations in the final days of a presidential campaign, which usually cost a candidate the election. For people living in Buffalo, New York, those words have a much different meaning.

On the night of October 12, 2006, I was walking to my car after having finished my shift at a Sprint store in Amherst, NY, a suburb of Buffalo, when it became apparent to me that it was noticeably colder than when I had gone in to work eight hours earlier. It had been raining most of the day, and the rain had changed over to sleet and then ice as the evening progressed. As I stood by my car trying to pull open the driver’s side door that had been frozen shut, I could hear large cracking noises off in the distance that seemed to happen every few seconds, which I correctly identified as limbs breaking off of trees in the area. The combination of ice and snow had weighed down the branches causing them to fall onto power lines, roads, vehicles, and houses across the region. Clearly, emergency responders were going to have their hands full.

I began seeing the response efforts on my slow and treacherous ride home as police directed traffic at intersections that had lost power. A drive that normally took 15 minutes ended up lasting two hours. I remember counting more than 10 vehicles that had been either abandoned on the side of the road or slid off into the ditch adjacent to Interstate 90, which was closed by authorities later that night. Listening to the radio, I learned that all flights at the Buffalo International Airport had been grounded, and that officials were preparing to shut down the border crossing into Canada.

By the time I reached my parents’ house, the snow had begun to accumulate significantly. Earlier weather forecasts had called for a few inches of precipitation possibly in the evening, but it was obvious that the weather service’s assessment had been dangerously inaccurate. Unprepared for a situation of this magnitude, towns across the Western New York region rushed to get snow removal equipment on the roads but their efforts were hampered by downed trees and power lines.

On the morning of Friday, October 13^th, the widespread devastation caused by the storm was apparent. County officials estimated that as many as 400,000 people were without power in the Buffalo area alone, and driving bans were instituted in the hardest hit locales¹. My parents were lucky and only lost power for a few hours, while my apartment remained dark for almost a week. The National Guard was called up to assist in the recovery operations and worked side-by-side with the electric company to restore power to customers, an effort which lasted nearly two weeks. By the time President Bush declared Western New York a major disaster area roughly ten days after the storm began, many children were finally returning to school.

In all, three people died as a direct result of the storm, and by the end of the first weekend nearly all of the record snowfall had melted away.² The October Surprise left in its wake millions of tons of debris that crews worked around the clock to clear out to return a sense of normality to residents. The resulting clean-up effort was evidence of what federal, state, and local authorities can accomplish when they are properly managed and organized toward a common objective.

Further Information:

Emergency Announcements from the Erie County Executive

http://www.erie.gov/news/storm_info_2006.asp

Report on Utility Performance – New York State Department of Public Service

http://www3.dps.state.ny.us/pscweb/webfileroom.nsf/Web/2D5910CDFE0696CA852572DD005F9D80/$File/WesternNewYorkOctober2006SnowstormFinalReport.pdf?OpenElement