Buffalo Digging Out of Record Snow; Cold Spreads to East, South

Most Buffalo residents happily took a day off Monday while road crews started digging them out of 3 feet of snow piled up by the city’s worst single-day storm on record.

“It’s such a glorious morning,” said Bo DeJenka, skiing along a city street. “There are mountains of snow and a sunny sky. Forget about your chores, forget about your job. Go skiing and have hot cocoa at the end of the day.”

Not everyone shared his opinion. Many stores and offices were closed. A concert was canceled. A travel ban was lifted Monday morning, but Mayor Anthony Masiello urged everyone to stay put while crews dug through drifts.

The storm was part of a huge cold wave that spread across much of the East and deep into the South, where Baton Rouge, La., had a record low Monday of 23 degrees. International Falls, Minn., hit 25 below zero.

Nearly three dozen deaths attributed to hypothermia and weather-related accidents were reported from Wisconsin to Georgia.

Buffalo’s record 37.9 inches of snow in 24 hours was produced by a narrow band of squalls along the shore of Lake Erie that became stuck over Buffalo, the National Weather Service said.

Towns a few miles outside the city received less than a foot of snow.

In fact, while the Greater Buffalo International Airport was closed Sunday, the Buffalo Bills, fresh from a road victory Sunday over the St. Louis Rams, were able to fly into Niagara Falls, only about 15 miles away.

Elsewhere in Upstate New York, snow plastered the eastern shore of Lake Ontario, giving Watertown 3 feet Sunday.

About a dozen shoppers spent the night at the Salmon Run Mall in Watertown because they could not get out of the parking lot late Sunday. Red Cross officials tried to take supplies to them but could not get through, said Bethany Bassage, a mall secretary.

The shoppers, chaperoned by a mall manager and security personnel, slept on furniture in the mall’s stores and ate food from the shops before leaving Monday morning.

Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., collected 43.5 inches of new snow Sunday, a record for a single storm, forcing many people to abandon cars and hike to work.

The early siege of bitter cold and snow was blamed for deaths caused by hypothermia, traffic accidents and fires, including three in Wisconsin, five in Michigan, two in Chicago, four in Maryland, one in Texas, two in Ohio and one in Georgia. In the West, three deaths were blamed on the cold in Denver, and Oregon had six weather-related weekend traffic deaths.

Iowa had 15 weather-related deaths during the weekend, including eight in one traffic accident and five in one fire.

In Rhode Island, three boys were in critical condition after being pulled unconscious from an ice-covered pond Sunday. A 7-year-old boy was in critical condition in Boston after his sled broke through ice on a pond, immersing him for about half an hour.