The lack of foresight and rescue resources, a road closure overdue and thousands of vehicles crossing the streets, combined with an unprecedented blizzard that caused the deadly Arctic ‘bomb’ in Buffalo
Buffalo is still nestled in a white lagoon. Scared, grieving under the weight of thirty dead from frostbite. See how a legion of 7,000 workers clean the streets and repair the last collapsed power lines a week after the visit of storm ‘Elliot’. At first there were thousands of homes without power, 1.7 million in the US, on Thursday there were only a few hundred. Seven days without power. In the dark. No heating. In sub-zero temperatures, look out the window at the snowdrifts that might be hiding a car full of frozen corpses. Days ago, some of those homes no longer thought about the street. According to the police reports, several tenants died of the cold surrounded by icy blankets and hard as boards.
It is a disbelieving city that wonders how an Arctic storm defeated and disarmed its 280,000 inhabitants in such a brutal and swift manner. To people who were used to dealing with the cold every winter. This city in northwestern New York symbolizes the tragedy of ‘Elliot’, a historical phenomenon in a country that has been plagued by extreme weather events in recent years. An Arctic ‘bomb’ without any comparison in the past half century that has already claimed more than 60 deaths in the United States; 33 of them in Erie and Niagara counties, 27 in the capital, Buffalo, where complications are still immense.
Since Monday, the National Police and the National Guard have been monitoring whether vehicles do not enter the dozens of half-blocked roads. The storm that continued over the weekend rendered the road network impassable, and as of Wednesday, 198 vehicles were still stranded in Erie under the ice. They had been there since last Friday when “Elliot” decided to unleash all his anger on the United States. Placed by drones, they remind us that the bodies of civilians facing desperation could still lie there, waiting to be rescued from their defeat before the icy night.
Major roads have been reopened in the province hardest hit by the storm. About a hundred Marechaussees cordoned off the rest. “Too many people are ignoring the ban” on driving into the interior of Buffalo, authorities warn. Snow is still more than a foot high in several parts of New York’s second-largest city, and clearing one lane of the metropolitan area’s 500 miles of highways, avenues and streets will take at least until next Friday, calculate the provincial officials.
No one yet knows for sure what the ice hides. Anndel Nicole Taylor, 22, was found dead in her car on Christmas Eve. He had gone to work the day before. On the way home, the car got stuck in the middle of a hurricane storm, with winds between 80 and 100 kilometers per hour. The thermometers plummeted. The ice age caused a semi-Antarctic wind chill. In Arkansas it scored -48º. In Iowa, -38º. Anndel has been calling emergency services all afternoon. In vain. The system was overwhelmed by thousands of simultaneous emergency calls.
All resources proved inadequate, despite reinforcements being sent to emergency services in northwestern New York as meteorologists began warning as early as December 19 of the arrival of a dangerous “arctic” bomb unlike any experienced by the state. The authorities argue that the number of medical and rescue personnel has fallen sharply over the past year (only in October, 10% less) due to the exhaustion caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the dismissal of numerous professionals due to the deterioration of their working conditions. . .
But Anndel was not aware of all these problems on Friday afternoon. She kept pressing a useless 911 number. The streets he traversed daily had become a white and hostile plain. Getting out of the car and walking was not an option. At midnight, he texted his sister in North Carolina. She told him she was very scared and she was going to try to sleep. That’s where it all ended. A patrol found his frozen body on Saturday. Three days later, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia admitted that there were still a thousand emergency calls like Anndel’s that had to be answered, mostly that same Friday.
The media is beginning to fill with complaints from residents of Erie and Niagara about the lack of administrative foresight. In view of the deterioration of the weather announced for Friday, December 23, many citizens called the authorities and the police the previous afternoon to request that traffic be banned in order to prevent people from leaving their homes to go to their homes. to go to work. The county recommended avoiding commuting. However, he did not make the decision to ban them until nine o’clock in the morning on the fateful Christmas Eve.
By then, the arctic “bomb” had exploded over the heads of thousands of people already on their way or at work. Buffalo is not an easy city. More than half of the population lives with just enough resources. Your neighbors cannot afford voluntary absences and lose a day’s wages. Chance also wanted ‘Elliot’ to arrive on a Friday, the day the weekly checks were cashed, at a time when they were needed more than ever to cover Christmas expenses.
Returning to their homes, tens of thousands of workers encountered the gaping jaws of a beast. Neighbors tell chilling stories. The blizzard blinded and cut faces. Snow blocked the streets and buried and crossed cars. Darkness reigned in a city subject to constant blackouts and where nothing worked. Motorists decided to abandon their vehicles in search of shelter. One of them, Abdul Sharifu, who had gone out to buy food for his pregnant wife, collapsed on a corner, exhausted. They found him sitting, turned into an ice statue. The body of a 56-year-old man was found lying on a couch. Forensics believes he paused to catch his breath. Another thirty people were locked in a barber shop for three days. The hairdresser, Craig Elston, explained that out of humanity he decided to sacrifice Christmas Eve and Christmas with his family: “People told me I saved their lives, that in another three minutes they felt like they were freezing to death. Some had purple fingers.” He’s a hero.
Even those who died in the open could not be picked up for the first 24 hours as the rescue and police vehicles were also jammed. Monique Alexander’s body lay under the awning of the Jewel King, a store near her home on Delaware Avenue, for nearly a day. Monique, a 52-year-old African-American beauty, had three grandchildren and cared for sick people in North Buffalo. “She was just the sweetest person,” says Cassey Maccarone, her 26-year-old daughter. He left home on Saturday. She wanted to do the last shopping for Christmas. Never come back. Cassey called her on the phone several times, but she didn’t answer. “I started to panic. I couldn’t believe I wouldn’t be returning,” the young woman says remorsefully.
Alarmed, she posted messages in the chats created on Facebook to search for those who disappeared during the storm. Fifteen minutes later, a man answered. He told her that he had found Monique half buried in the snow. He had died of rapid fatal hypothermia a short distance from his home. He tried to take her frozen body to a shelter, but “he couldn’t walk her in the middle of the storm,” says the daughter. Finally, he put it under the awning of a jewelry store to keep the snow from covering it, waiting for the National Guard to rescue it. “He loved his grandchildren and his family,” Casey explained to the “Buffalo News.” “We’ll never know why he came out in the middle of the storm. He may have wanted to buy some food before all the shops closed.
A dozen civic organizations have called for the mayor, Byron W. Brown, to resign. They accuse him not only of improvisation but also of racial tension (he is black) that arose after the storm. Many in the African American community feel that the government has treated them unequally. They rely on photos and videos taken by volunteers, which would show that snowplows have been pulled through white-majority communities like Kenmore more often than through areas inhabited by black and low-income citizens. Buffalo’s driving ban expired Thursday after improved road conditions, but hundreds of African-American residents are still snowbound on the East Side.
“I think travel should have been banned long before the storm hit.” The criticism comes from Felicia Williams, an auxiliary mechanic, who spent much of the storm in her ambulance, stranded in a spontaneously springing cooler next to a barricade of abandoned cars. He recalls his helplessness in the face of reports from the station of families trapped on the road with their babies, people with frostbite symptoms, neighbors trying to fight the cold in their homes in the dark by boiling water on gas stoves, sick people who remained without medication and medical colleagues who, like them, could not move through the streets. Byron B. Brown has apologized for the chaos. Unimaginable weather conditions and the absolute paralysis of the streets are two factors of enormous weight that, according to the mayor, exacerbated the catastrophe. “The weather got too bad,” apologizes the highest authority of one of New York’s coldest populations, but who had never experienced the devastating potential of “Elliot.”
Carolyn Eubanks, 64, is also among the frost giant’s posthumous victims. He passed away on Christmas Eve. He was out of oxygen because of his heart condition. He lived in Cheektowaga, a few miles from the home of his sons, Antwaine Parker and his stepbrother Kenneth Johnson. The two rushed to his aid. It took seven hours to get there. His SUV stopped. Tires go flat at those temperatures. They finished the journey on foot, half buried in the snow. By this time, his mother was breathing with great difficulty. The emergency doctors couldn’t come. They were blocked.
Both decided to take her to a hospital on their own. But Carolyn died in the snow with her children holding her by the shoulders. “I can’t go on,” she sighed, “Mom, just get up,” Parker encouraged her. But “he never said another word.” Their children couldn’t shed a tear either. At tens of degrees below zero and aware of the impossibility of returning to Cheektowaga, they began to experience frostbite symptoms. They knocked in terror on the doors of several nearby houses. A family has opened. In their living room, Antwaine and Kenneth were able to watch over their mother’s corpse. Two days later, a hole in the blizzard allowed her to transfer her to a funeral home.
Source: La Verdad
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