Buffalo resident here. The city advises other cities around the world on rapid snow removal, but this was a whole new level of batshit insane weather, almost all of fueled by wind and lake effect snow. Last month some of us had seven feet of snow dropped on us in a day, but shrugged off as usual. The extreme lack of visibility from the wind (basically a hurricane with snow), which we aren’t prepped for, in narrow streets is what made the situation a nightmare. This isn’t a US thing, New York thing or even Erie County thing, just an alignment of circumstances such as geography (this was a ten mile thin corridor, where anywhere outside of it was relatively untouched), as well as poverty and income inequality issues that made this weekend so deadly.

Canadian here. I’d hazard to guess that no major Canadian city has ever been hit with anything close to a comparable blizzard to what Buffalo just went through.

More snow? Maybe somewhere in the Rockies. Buffalo airport is at 50” through today, which is way more than double the single storm records in Montreal, Halifax, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Regina and Toronto. St. John’s is the only major city I can find with a comparable record.

Colder? Yes.

But full blizzard conditions with Cat. 1 winds for 36+ hours?

I genuinely doubt that’s ever happened in any major Canadian city, and when big historic blizzards have hit, they also killed a bunch of Canadians, too.

Really, the lake effect conditions that caused this storm basically do not exist anywhere there’s a Canadian city over 100,000.

The only thing comparable might be a big winter nor’easter on the Atlantic coast.

This is some nonsense. This was a century level storm. Part of the problem is Buffalo deals with storms all the time so people thought they could run home on the leading edge but it hit so hard and suddenly they got caught. It wasn't just the snow, it was complete whiteout conditions were people were getting lost going outside in their own neighborhood and 70 mph wind gusts where the snow was all coming in sideways. The killer was even the emergency vehicles built to get places would try to get to emergencies and all got stuck. There were no emergency services and a lot of the first deaths were due to that. You have a heart attack, well that's too bad. Lose power in 11 degree weather, or your windows break from the hurricane winds, hope you figure it out.

Yup. Way less $, way worse infrastructure…and in Winnipeg it regularly gets to -45 with that wind and shit ton of snow. I know it’s being called a “storm of the century” but come on, you know thats just the media. We get these “storms of the century” basically every winter. Rarely do we have people die here as a result of a winter storm, let alone 20+, that is pathetic. Poor planning or something, that shouldn’t happen.