Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - The City of Buffalo, Erie County and New York Governor Kathy Hochul have all made announcements Thursday that the Western New York area is in a "State of Emergency" during the storm. All are urging the public to take the approaching storm seriously and avoid any unnecessary travel beginning Friday.
New York State
Governor Kathy Hochul was in Niagara Falls on Thursday where she detailed the preparations the state did to prepare the area for the storm.
"New York is ready to respond. All hands are on deck 24/7," said Governor Hochul. "Operations Centers are already stood up and coordinating with our local authorities and our county executives."
"Utility workers. We normally have 5,000. We have 7,500 already pre-positioned even before the first limb falls, we're ready to handle this. So we'll be preparing for that. Over 2,000 snow plows are being deployed with our chainsaws and generators ready to be at all the traffic signals when they come down," Hochul adds. She also makes detailed State of Emergency, read more about that below.
Erie County
When it comes to Erie County, their Department of Public Works Commissioner Bill Geary says they've done some pre-salting and and there may be some adjustments they have to make compared to last storm. If they can't see the roads, they may not be out with their rigs and he reminds us that if their rigs aren't out there, cars should absolutely not be out.
"There's been a lot of planning that's been going on, and oftentimes, we get questioned with regards to, 'What are you doing now?' Well, this actually goes back six months, eight months, 10 months, so we prepare for this. Unfortunately, this time, we're going to be hit with with a lot of different curveballs here," said Geary. "In addition to the snow, we're going to have the winds. We know we're going to have power outages. So our preparation that takes place here is the communication and that collaborative effort with all of our partners out there - whether they happen to be the municipals or they happen to also be the utilities that we have to deal with on a regular basis - to plan for this type of thing here."
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz says they are only responsible for certain roads in Erie County and will try to assist with plowing as best as they can, such as with the City of Buffalo. "We're positioning equipment across the county. and just to remind everybody, we are responsible for 1200 centerline miles of roads, we also rely on towns in some of the villages to actually assist us in plowing. We don't plow every road that we actually own and control. We rely on our partners to do that and of course, we don't plow in the city of Buffalo because we don't have a responsibility with that. If the city should ask for assistance, we will try to help them out."
"We are also going to have our third party contractors at the ready. So it's not just going to be our Department of Public Works plows, our contractors will be at the ready if need be to help clear out snow and if it gets to a certain height, especially drifting if it drifts over roads and you got three to four feet of snow on a road, you really can't push that with a plow. Gotta get in there with a high lift. So you learn from the past," the county executive adds.
Erie County also vocalized concerns with potential impacts of heightened water levels along the shoreline, Poloncarz says action is being taken to avoid an increase of water levels in other key areas.
"I've already made a request to New York State to have NYPA [New York Power Authority] increase the amount of water that is taken through the Power Authority intake system in Niagara Falls, so that we can reduce the amount of water that's actually in the Niagara River. So that request has been made," he said. "I talked to Jackie Bray, the Commissioner of Homeland Security and Emergency Services for New York State not too long ago, and put in the request, and she was going to talk to NYPA about doing that. We want to reduce the amount of water that's in the Niagara River. We're not going to be able to affect, of course, Lake Erie, but we can reduce the amount of water that's in the Niagara River, which hopefully will reduce flooding that often occurs in these situations in Tonawanda, Grand Island and Niagara Falls."
See the link below for the full audio of the full story and audio of the announcement:
City of Buffalo
Dave Bertola of National Grid says crews will be ready with out-of-state help. "We will have a total crew of 2,800 members, some of whom we're bringing in from Texas, Tennessee, and other states to help us so that we can help you," says Bertola. He adds safety will be a priority. "We drill and train year round with municipalities and emergency service personnel all across Western New York and this weekend is our game day and we're ready."
"From a DPW standpoint, we will have our crews, Parks Department, engineering, streets, obviously the number one teams out there, working the streets, our equipment, we mobilized our partnership with our real estate group, and state and county officials who we've been in contact with and continue to be in contact with as well during the storm," says Nate Marton, Buffalo Department of Public Works Commissioner said.
Conclusion
Aside from the overall theme being the region is in a State of Emergency, the main takeaways from these announcements are everybody should stay home and power outages are expected.
"In the last storm, we lost three people to storm-related health events. Let's not do it again. Let's be smart. So as the county executive mentioned, it's not smart, it's stupid to go outside in these conditions," said Dr. Gale Burstein.
"We're also talking about significant power outages. We've had power outages with ice storms in the past and snow storms. You learn from how the response time goes. If the power goes out and it and the conditions are such that we can't put our plows on the roads, National Grid are not necessarily going to send their crews out because they don't want to put them in a dangerous situation, which means you might have power out for an extended period," says Poloncarz.
