Icy Wind Too Much Even for Buffalo

BUFFALO, N.Y. — A fierce “lake effect” storm packing winds of up to 48 mph brought travel to a halt Saturday with up to 2 feet of snow, too much even for a city accustomed to severe winter weather.

“Being from Buffalo, I’ve seen worse. But it’s bad out there,” said Robert Smith, a service station mechanic who watched people struggle to walk down a snow-clogged street. “I guess we’re paying for the mild winter we had so far.”

Mayor Anthony Masiello banned driving in the city for most of Saturday so crews could plow the streets without running into stalled cars. Buffalo’s airport also shut down for much of the day.

Although Buffalo averages 99 inches of snow per year, the 21.4 inches measured at the airport at noon Saturday was the city’s fourth greatest 24-hour snowfall since 1893, according to the National Weather Service. And the city’s northern suburbs measured 24 inches.

Elsewhere, hundreds of miles of highways remained snowbound on the northern Plains, with some drifts standing up to 16 feet high. The weather has been blamed for at least 31 deaths since the wintry blast hit the region late Wednesday, and unknown numbers of travelers were stuck in truck stops and other shelters.

Among those rescued was Karen Nelson, whose pickup truck became stranded off the highway in northeastern South Dakota.

In Sioux Falls, S.D., Nelson said she prayed and cried while huddling alone inside her pickup, snowbound in a howling blizzard. Her only contact with the outside world since Thursday morning had been by cellular phone.

Friday night, after she had been without food or water for 40 hours, rescuers found her outside Webster.

“I just sat there. I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything, so I just made a tent out of my sleeping bag and put it over top of me and put my cell phone in the middle of my tummy and just sat there,” Nelson, 51, said from Lake Area Hospital in Webster on Saturday.

She hadn’t suffered any frostbite and was in good condition, her husband, Marvin, said.

President Clinton declared a state of emergency in South Dakota after dangerously cold windchills and blowing snow made travel treacherous.

Gov. William Janklow said 2,000 people, including more than 400 National Guardsmen, were working to reopen snow-packed highways. More than 500 pieces of snow-removal equipment were on the road, including plows borrowed from Nebraska.

“We’ve got every piece of equipment we own and can beg, borrow and steal out there,” Janklow said, but he added that plows would be taken off the roads during the night because hydraulic equipment was freezing.

Overnight lows in South Dakota were expected to fall to 30 below zero, not counting the effect of the wind. Farther west, Havre, Mont., bottomed out at 41 below zero Saturday morning, and Minot, N.D., reported a windchill of 82 below.

Meteorologists offered little hope for a reprieve from the cold, and forecasters said subzero readings would linger through the weekend.

About a 200-mile stretch of Interstate 94 across eastern North Dakota was still closed by deep snow between Bismarck and Fargo, 150 miles of I-94 was reopened Saturday west of Bismarck and a 120-mile section in Minnesota also was reopened for the first time since Thursday.

North-south I-29, however, was still shut for about 400 miles from the Canadian border to Sioux Falls, S.D.

One drift on I-29 in southeastern North Dakota was up to the top of a 16-foot-high overpass. “When we get something like that, it’s going to take some time,” said state Transportation Department spokesman Troy Gilbertson.