Syracuse, N.Y. — The lake effect snowstorm that forced the postponement of the Buffalo Bills playoff game originally scheduled for Sunday has dropped nearly 4 feet of snow in Western New York, and it’s not done yet.
The highest total reported so far by the National Weather Service is 41.3 inches, in the southern Erie County town of Hamburg. The town is about 5 miles from Lake Erie, the source of more than two days worth of unrelenting lake effect snow as southwest winds whipped across the open waters.
In Orchard Park, where the Bills play in Highmark Stadium, 18 inches of snow had fallen by 7 a.m. today. The wild card playoff game against the Pittsburgh Steelers had been scheduled for 1 p.m. Sunday, but the forecast of blizzard-like conditions pushed the game back to 4:30 p.m. today.
A few more inches of snow is forecast today, the weather service said, but the bands of heavy lake effect snow will diminish and drift northward in the afternoon. By game time, there will be light flurries and a wind chill in the single digits at the stadium.
The emergency travel ban in Erie County, imposed Saturday night, has been lifted except for the city of Lackawanna and the towns of Cheektowaga and Lancaster, County Executive Mark Poloncarz said on X, formerly Twitter.
The seats in Highmark Stadium remained buried in snow as the sun rose this morning, and the Bills put out another call for fans to help shovel. The pay is $20 an hour.
The big numbers posted in places like Hamburg won’t make the official record books, though, because the weather service’s measuring site is the Buffalo airport, well north of the heaviest snow from this storm. On Sunday, 8.6 inches of snow fell at the airport. Strangely enough given the huge totals to the south, that 8.6 inches was enough to break the record for Jan. 14, which was 7.8 inches, set 60 years ago.
The airport has accumulated 10.8 inches of snow in the three-day storm, enough to just barely crack the top 50 sites.
Below is a searchable, sortable table of snowfall totals for Western New York and Tug Hill, compiled by the weather service Buffalo office as of 10:30 a.m. today. The list is incomplete and unofficial, and these numbers could get even higher as more snow falls and more totals get reported.
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