In New York’s Erie County, home to Buffalo, ambulances were taking more than three hours to make a single hospital trip and the blizzard may be « the worst storm in our community’s history. »
Millions of people hunkered down in a deep freeze overnight and early morning to ride out the frigid storm that has gripped much of the United States, trapping some residents inside homes with heaping snow drifts and knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses.
CBS News has confirmed at least 20 weather-related deaths from the storm nationwide.
The scope of the storm has been nearly unprecedented, stretching from the Great Lakes near Canada to the Rio Grande along the border with Mexico. About 60% of the U.S. population faced some sort of winter weather advisory or warning, and temperatures plummeted drastically below normal from east of the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, the National Weather Service said.
Thousands of U.S. flights were canceled Saturday, and another 1,300 as of Sunday morning, according to the tracking site .
Forecasters said a — when atmospheric pressure drops very quickly in a strong storm — had developed near the Great Lakes, stirring up blizzard conditions, including heavy winds and snow.
The storm unleashed its full fury on Buffalo, with hurricane-force winds and snow causing whiteout conditions, paralyzing emergency response efforts — New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said almost every fire truck in the city was stranded — and shutting down the airport through Monday, according to officials.
Freezing conditions and day-old power outages had Buffalo residents scrambling Saturday to get out of their homes to anywhere that had heat. But with city streets under a thick blanket of white, that wasn’t an option for people like Jeremy Manahan, who charged his phone in his parked car after almost 29 hours without electricity.
« There’s one warming shelter, but that would be too far for me to get to. I can’t drive, obviously, because I’m stuck, » Manahan said. « And you can’t be outside for more than 10 minutes without getting frostbit. »
Mark Poloncarz, executive of Erie County, home to Buffalo, said ambulances were taking more than three hours to make a single hospital trip and the blizzard may be « the worst storm in our community’s history.
