The Blizzard of 2022 hit Buffalo and other parts of the region with a ferocity not seen in at least 45 years.
While there is scant data available, the historic storm appears to have had a particularly devastating impact on Black people in the city.
The majority of those who died in Erie County due to the storm — 51% — were Black, Erie County officials said, even though Black people make up just 14% of the county population and 33% of residents in Buffalo.
“Ever since (Hurricane) Katrina, ever since Covid-19, everybody knows that these extreme weather events are going to have a devastating impact on communities of color, and particularly African American communities,” said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., director of the University at Buffalo’s Center for Urban Studies. “The city and others know this and should have had a disaster plan. In fact, they had no plan.”
Many of Buffalo’s Black residents live in neighborhoods on the East Side, in the Ellicott, Masten and University Council Districts, where Black people represent from 56% to 77% of the population.
But the city, Erie County and National Grid have not released data that can be used to thoroughly measure the the storm’s impact on different groups of city residents — by race, by neighborhood or by income level.
City leaders say they are still in recovery mode and analysis of this kind will come later, once the city is dug out. They say much of this data is currently being tallied by city and county workers.
Mayor Byron W. Brown replied that all parts of the city were impacted by the storm when asked if neighborhoods on the city’s East Side were hit the hardest. His administration has declined to release a list of deaths by Council district. Erie County officials have also declined to release the names, ages and locations of all of those who perished.
“This affected a lot of people across the city,” Brown said. “At the height of the storm, there were over 20,000 residents without power in different parts of the city, and it wasn’t necessarily concentrated in any one area of the city.”
But the blizzard’s impact on Black residents is apparent to some who live in neighborhoods with high poverty levels. Residents, community activists, pastors, researchers and emergency management experts who spoke to The Buffalo News say the blizzard exposed the vulnerabilities of underserved communities.
They say the storm laid bare how inequity can be a matter of life and death in disaster situations, such as when the winds started whipping off Lake Erie. And they say well-meaning but tone-deaf actions by government officials did not solve those problems, and in some cases made things worse.
Early warning system
Brown and Erie County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz urged people to stay home, as they often do in anticipation of snowstorms. They also warned that the blizzard would be worse than the average storm.
“We’ve seen storms during my tenure that have been pretty severe,” Brown said in a late-morning news conference on Dec. 23, as the storm began to rage. “This one is a little different, which is why a driving ban has been imposed. This is a very dangerous storm with a combination of elements that we’re seeing right now.”
But in a region known for handling storms that would paralyze other cities — and coming on the heels of November’s mega-storm that dumped more than 6 feet of snow in some areas — some say that message did not break through to enough people.
“Snow does not put fear in people’s hearts in Buffalo,” Taylor said. “As we’re used to joking, we are snow tough. But this was different. But because that difference was not sufficiently explained, a lot of people kind of misunderstood.”
Natalie Simpson, chair of the operations management and strategy department at the University at Buffalo, said the English language is “woefully devoid of vocabulary to describe the different things that can happen with snow.”
“The only word you have is the B-word: blizzard,” said Simpson, who studies emergency response operations. “When you lump them all into one category, people tend to lump them in their minds as to what happens most frequently.”
Simpson said blizzards are like “hurricanes of the North” and could use their own system like the Hurricane Wind Scale, a 1 to 5 category rating based on a hurricane’s sustained wind speed.
Lester McDade, a private contractor who was removing snow Thursday night in front of the African American Cultural Center on Masten Avenue, said authorities should consider such a system in the future.
“If they would have said, ‘This is going to be a Category 4. Stay in your houses, everything’s shut down,’ I think people would have listened a little more,” McDade said. “If they would have put more of an urgency on the emergency and what this was really going to be, I think they could have saved a lot of lives.”
‘A cascading failure’
Taylor said his research shows that East Buffalo and other poor areas have suffered from a lack of infrastructure investment for years, from pipes to sidewalks to weather-resistant housing. Buffalo has the oldest housing stock of any major city in America, U.S. Census data show.
“Many people over there are living with substandard housing, housing with improper insulation, housing that’s drafty anyway, housing that had the most ancient of heating systems in it,” he said.
National Grid officials told The News that two of the five substations that lost power during the blizzard serviced the East Side. One of the stations is on Spillman Place, near Canisius College, and the other is at East Delevan and Fillmore avenues.
They told the mayor, though, that the outages had nothing to do with a lack of repairs or investment.
“I asked National Grid that question,” Brown said. “This is happening in certain areas. Is it that equipment is not upgraded, that equipment has not been invested in the same way in these areas? And National Grid’s response, at the highest levels, was, ‘Absolutely not.’ “
Rob Galbraith, a researcher who lives in Masten Park, pointed to a utility pole he said was hit by a car at the corner of Masten Avenue and Riley Street in November. On Thursday night, wires hung down from the teetering pole.
“Instead of replacing it, they just set up a new one and lashed the old broken one to it,” Galbraith said.
A National Grid spokesman on Sunday said that is standard procedure. If a pole is hit, he said, the electric company installs a new pole and transfers the electricity service to that poll. “We then anchor the damaged pole to the new one to ensure that conditions are safe so that the remaining equipment on the damaged pole that’s owned by other utilities — phone, cable — can be transferred to the new pole,” National Grid spokesman David Bertola said. “Once those facilities are transferred, the communications company is responsible for removing the old pole.”
Others point to a lack of “human infrastructure” in the storm response. The city had no storm hotline. While citywide text messages were sent, the wireless emergency alert system, like those used for missing children, was not used.
Pastor Al Robinson opened the doors of his Lovejoy church as a makeshift shelter because there were only two official warming centers open in the city when the blizzard first struck.
“These are elderly, broke, poor people and they need help,” Robinson said.
While Brown and Poloncarz spent much of their time talking about driving bans, there was less discussion about feeding people or warning lower income residents who do not own cars that during a blizzard with winds as high as 79 mph, walking was just as treacherous, Taylor said.
“This unfortunately is an excellent case study in what we call a cascading failure,” said Simpson, the UB researcher. “When that cascade starts, it’s all about human survival at this point. How much forethought before the blizzard did we actually give to that?”
Inequity of messaging
Officials urged residents to stock up on food, water and other supplies in advance of the storm, but Alexander Wright, founder of the African Heritage Food Co-op, said that’s difficult in lower-income communities.
“There’s a saying that when the world gets a cold, poor people — especially Black folks — get the flu,” Wright said. “That more Black people had to go out looking for food because they couldn’t stock up ahead of time shows what we have been saying, that we do live in food deserts, that we have victims of food apartheid, and that we need full-service grocery stores in our communities within walking distance.”
Poloncarz’s announcement that the National Guard would be coming to town to enforce the driving ban and issue tickets drew the harshest response from critics, who also said Brown over-emphasized shoplifting and robbery with the creation of an “anti-looting” police detail.
“Employing an increased fleet of law enforcement and military to ticket residents, many of whom have been without lights, warmth and safe shelter for days, is a disgrace and a waste of tax dollars and time,” said a statement from the activist group Black Love Resists in the Rust, which is suing the city over its policing in Black communities.
Poloncarz later deleted a tweet announcing the ticketing and Brown also clarified that tickets would not be issued. Simpson said the Guard’s involvement in traffic control was a sound emergency management strategy, albeit one that was unartfully stated. Poloncarz later said the ticketing information was erroneously tweeted by a staff member.
“That did kind of pull me up a little short,” Simpson said. “Not what was being done — that made sense to me as an emergency analyst — but how it was communicated. But remember, the leaders have also been through hell. They are going to make mistakes.”
If any positives can be drawn from the storm response, she said it’s the dozens of groups — like the Buffalo Mutual Aid Network Facebook page and many in Buffalo’s Bangladeshi community — that stepped up to fill gaps in services.
“The original kind of vision of emergency management was that volunteers had no role,” Simpson said. “But if we’re talking about a large-scale disaster, clearly volunteers and community groups, play a very important role in successful outcomes. Therefore, let’s find out how to actually involve them in the formal planning.”
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