Hey! You folks back east! You think you had a blizzard? Really? You want blizzard? I'll give you blizzard...
I flew into the Buffalo International Airport on the evening of January 27th, 1977.
And yes, my arms were tired. Very tired.
The flight was uneventful, the trip to the downtown Marriott was uneventful, and my preparation for my meeting at 7:15 the next morning with a group of physicians at the hospital across the street was uneventful.
In short, like so many other flights and so many other cities and so many other hotels and so many other hospitals, there was nothing to make that cold, crisp, clear Buffalo night any different than any other.
Except it was.
Early the next morning I hopped out of bed, showered, shaved and proceeded to dress in one of my sharper suits. While I did, the morning news was reporting that Buffalo was being hit by near-record snowfall and that the city was pretty much locked down. Damn! I headed down the elevator and toward the hotel lobby exit, which was one of those revolving doors high-zoot hotels feature to help justify their enormous prices. I recall thinking in the back of my mind as I walked toward the exit that it seemed strangely "white" through the windows and glass door ahead. White. One should be able to see through it, I thought to myself, kind of, in the back of my mind, as I reached the door and began to push.
It didn't move.
I pushed and pushed and pushed against the door to try and get to move, but it was stuck solid. And it hit me within no more than a quarter-second that the entire front end of the hotel was covered in a blanket of snow. A DRIFT of snow! This was not good, I thought. Not good at all...
There was no one else in the lobby. Nobody at all. Nobody in the bell station, nobody behind the desk, nobody in the little card shop convenience store that overcharges. Just me. I kept looking and finally found a group of people gathered in the kitchen. Maybe 20 or so were all there, talking at once, feverishly trying to find out what was going on. One of the security guards reported that there was a drift of snow 35 feet high covering the front of the hotel, all the way up to the third floor.
He reported that it was so bad none of the employees could get in to the city, so none of the hotel's services were available to its guests. Worse yet, we were snowed in and nobody could leave! Are you s**ting me!
It didn't take long for my Army training to kick in and start figuring out what to do from here. I got the group together, took charge, divided the by-now 50 or-so to teams, appointed leaders, and began marshaling our resources. We had lots of food, and lots of stuff to drink at the bar, so what's the problem, I thought? We all had a permission slip from God to take off however long this "emergency" lasted, I thought. Damn! I hit the brass ring!
Emergency? What emergency? I opened up the bar (I used to tend professionally) and made everybody a drink. A 7:00 in the morning, drink. One of the group had been a cook so he took charge of menu planning. Another was a stand-up comedian, believe it or not, so he kept us all entertained. We had a doctor, so there's that. We partied like it was 1999 long before it was 1999. It was a major-league hoot!
And that's how it all unfolded for the hundred or so of us intrepid lodgers who spent a total of five days in the lap of Marriott luxury. I flew in on a Sunday evening and it was Thursday morning before they could dig us all out. We had to make our own beds, because the maids couldn't get downtown, but we figured that was a small price to pay. It was so bad, in fact, that one intrepid soul actually stripped down to his undies and did a dive off the third floor balcony, right smack into the snow drift above the Marriot sign. This was before cell phone cameras, or I'm sure it would still be a viral YouTube sensation.
The good news is that Marriott comped our rooms and the food and, as they said, "hundreds of gallons of liquor," since we were being held "captive." So the comedian got us all to agree not to sue. And I'm pleased to report that there has never, ever been a snowstorm of that magnitude to hit Buffalo since. Some areas got more than 12 feet of snow! I was there. Just your roving reporter. Just your Scribe Without Porfolio. Doing what God put me here to do.
File this as just another story from the intrepid case files of The Chuckmeister...
The blizzard of 1977 hit Western New York as well as southern Ontario from January 28 to February 1. Daily peak wind gusts ranging from 46 to 69 mph (74 to 111 km/h) were recorded by the National Weather Service in Buffalo, with snowfall as high as 100 in (254 cm) recorded in areas, and the high winds blew this into drifts of 30 to 40 ft (9 to 12 m). (Wikipedia)
ReplyDeleteThere's so much more I could have said, and you said some of it. I come from a place where bad weather is a feature of life, so I'll just leave it at this; it was by far the worst storm I've ever seen, and I've seen some storms. A "100 Year Storm," they called it. I'd say maybe a thousand...
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