Buffalo Beefs Up Emergency Response Planning in Response to 2014 Blizzard

It has been a year since the 2014 “Snovember” blizzard that buried parts of Buffalo, N.Y., in up to seven feet of snow and resulted in 14 deaths. In response to that disaster, Buffalo’s Office of Homeland Security/Emergency Management (OHS/EM) has taken substantial steps to be much better prepared.

Miscommunication or resistance interfered with efforts to clear streets and town officials complained that the county failed to send plows where they were most urgently needed.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz countered that town officials refused to make use of a computer-based system to coordinate the response of crews and also didn’t take part in daily conference calls.

So what went wrong? According to OHS/EM Commissioner Garnell Whitfield, Buffalo and the surrounding county were “overwhelmed” by the sheer scale of this “once in a century” snow emergency. After all, it did dump up to seven feet of snow in parts of the city over seven days. “We have a lot of new equipment and new strategies going forward,” he said.

The emergency response to this massive snowfall was exacerbated by snow equipment requests to other counties and the state not being fulfilled as quickly as city and county officials needed them to be. Coordinating rescue and relief activities was also tremendously difficult in snow-buried sections, as was managing the safety of hospitals in particular and residents in general.

Many lessons were learned as a result of the storm and its attendant loss of life. Some of these were addressed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s NY Responds initiative in August 2015. Under this program, New York state is giving all 62 state counties free access to Buffalo Computer Graphics’ crisis information management software by year’s end, so that the “miscommunication” that occurred in Buffalo during Snovember doesn’t happen again. The state has also spent $50 million to buy a vast new fleet of plow trucks, loaders, graders and dump trucks that will be shared by all 62 counties as needed. Should Buffalo get hit by another seven feet of snowfall (or less), there will be much more snow removal equipment available to help out.

Whitfield is gratified by the improvements provided by NY Responds, which supplements the city of Buffalo’s own efforts. But resource enhancements aside, Whitfield said that the biggest lesson he learned from Snovember is that “communications (between agencies) are imperative.”

To this end, Buffalo OHS/EM has spent the last year strengthening its ties with local first responders and health-care officials, plus other county governments and the NY State Department of Transportation. The resulting improved communications will smooth the process of interagency cooperation – which broke down during the storm – and ensure that things don’t get out of hand next time.

The key to these improvements has been “to have discussions before emergencies occur,” Whitfield said. Now, as a result of his agency’s post-Snovember consultations with other agencies, “we play very well together,” he said. This includes knowing what each agency needs to do their job, and what support they need to get from each other during times of crisis. “You need to be considerate of each other,” he said.

In addition to improving interagency communications, Buffalo OHS/EM has improved the depth of its emergency management strategy. It now includes details such as working out plans for reaching and evacuating affected residents in an efficient manner; preventing personal vehicles from entering and then blocking roads in disaster-affected regions, and knowing beforehand which people and businesses are vital to keeping the city running in times of crisis. (Buffalo OHS/EM consulted with local firms as well when reformulating its plans; again to ensure that its revisions were comprehensive and covered as many bases as possible.)

One year after Snovember, Buffalo OHS/EM is better equipped and prepared to deal with another snow emergency; and indeed any kind of natural/man-made disaster that might occur.