US President Joe Biden on Monday sent federal aid to western New York to help state and local authorities clean up from the massive storm that dumped more than 1.8m of snow in western and northern New York, and is blamed for three deaths, the White House said.
The emergency declaration authorizes the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate disaster relief in 11 counties hit by the lake-effect snowstorm on Friday and Saturday.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul thanked Biden for granting her request for emergency aid, and added in a news release: “My team and I will continue working around the clock to keep everyone safe, help communities dig out, and secure every last dollar to help rebuild and recover from this unprecedented, record-shattering historic winter storm.”
Photo: AP
US National Weather Service observers reported 2.03m of snow in the Buffalo suburbs of Hamburg and Orchard Park, and 1.88m in Natural Bridge, a hamlet near Watertown off the eastern end of Lake Ontario.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz raised the death toll from the storm from two to three.
All of those who died were men who had heart attacks while clearing snow, Poloncarz said.
The first significant snow of the season tested Buffalo streets crews and Buffalo Commissioner Nathan Marton, who faced “trial by fire,” Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said, responding to complaints that some streets were impassable two days after the worst of the snow.
“I would have liked the first snow event of the year not to have been a massive, historic lake-effect storm,” Brown said at an afternoon news briefing.
“If you have a historic Mother Nature event with over 4 feet [1.22m] of snow in a densely populated area, I don’t know where people expect all that snow to go,” he said. “It has to be hauled out.”
Marton said that 114 pieces of heavy equipment were at work in the hardest hit areas of south Buffalo on Monday, including bucket loaders that were scooping snow into dump trucks and driving it out of neighborhoods.
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