The Night the Leaves Were Still Green

Ask anybody who lived in Western New York on October 12, 2006, and they can take you right back there. It is one of those shared memories that stitches a whole region together, the night a freak snowstorm caught a million people completely off guard. Twenty years later, we still just call it the October Surprise, and it still sets the bar for what a storm can do to this place.

The cruel genius of it was the timing. The trees across the region were still in full leaf, green and heavy, nowhere near ready for winter. When wet, heavy snow started stacking up on all those leaves, the branches simply could not hold the weight. What followed was a long, loud night that changed the landscape for years.

It Started as Rain

There was nothing menacing about how it began. The precipitation came down as an ordinary cold rain on the afternoon of Thursday, October 12. Forecasters were not even sure it would turn to snow, or where it might pile up this early in the season. The early thinking called for a few inches.

Then the lake did what the lake does. An unusually strong system dragged a cold Arctic air mass over the still-warm waters of Lake Erie, and the rain turned first to graupel, those soft little pellets of snow, and then to the real thing. At the storm's overnight peak, snow fell as fast as four inches an hour in parts of Erie County, and thundersnow, a rare flash-and-rumble of lightning inside a snowstorm, rolled on for hours. By the time it let up on Friday, October 13, about 22.6 inches had piled up at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport. Two decades later, that is still the most snow Buffalo has ever recorded in the month of October.

The Sound Nobody Forgets

People who were awake for it almost always describe the same thing. The sound. All night, across every neighborhood from Buffalo to Kenmore to the Tonawandas to Amherst and Cheektowaga, big limbs cracked and crashed down under the weight of the snow. Power lines popped and sparked. One by one, then whole streets at a time, the lights went out, starting in the early evening and rolling across the region as the snow kept coming.

The damage landed on houses and cars and anything else in the way. In one Buffalo yard, a big box maple split right down the middle and came down on Joan Casey's home, the kind of scene that repeated itself on street after street. By the time the Buffalo Police Department was fielding thousands of calls in a single night, most of them about the weather, it was clear this was something the region had never quite seen before, at least not in October.

Going Dark

When the sun came up on Friday, Western New York woke to a wrecked, white, powerless landscape. More than 400,000 homes and businesses had lost electricity. For some, it flickered back within a day or two. For others, the darkness and the cold stretched on. It took roughly 11 days to get everyone reconnected, and some neighborhoods sat without power for the better part of two weeks.

As a National Grid regional director later put it, it was the perfect storm, leaves still on the trees meeting wet, heavy snow, a combination that turned an early-season event into a catastrophe. More than half of the customers who lost power were National Grid customers, and the crews that restored it became some of the most welcome sights in the region.

The Danger in the Dark

The hardest part of the story is the human cost, and it deserves to be told plainly. The October Surprise was ultimately blamed for roughly a dozen deaths across the region. Four of them came from carbon monoxide poisoning, the result of generators and heaters run without proper ventilation as people tried to stay warm, and more than 200 others were sickened by carbon monoxide. In the years since, those deaths became a hard lesson that gets repeated every time the power goes out and a generator comes on, a reminder that the quiet danger after a storm can be as real as the storm itself.

A Region Shut Down

For a day or two, Western New York simply stopped. The Buffalo Niagara International Airport closed as snow clogged the runways and the facility lost power. A 105-mile stretch of the New York State Thruway between Rochester and Dunkirk shut down for nearly a full day, stranding motorists. Driving bans went up in Buffalo and in suburbs like Amherst, Blasdell, Orchard Park and Hamburg. Schools across many districts closed for a week or more. All told, the storm did somewhere around $160 million in damage across the Buffalo metro area, with flooded basements from all that melting snow accounting for the single biggest share of the cost.

Neighbors With Chainsaws

Here is where the story turns, and where it becomes a Buffalo story instead of just a weather story. As soon as it was safe to step outside, people went to work, and not just on their own yards. Neighbors with chainsaws cleared each other's driveways and dragged fallen limbs to the curb. People lucky enough to have power ran extension cords across property lines so the family next door could keep a refrigerator going or charge a phone. Firewood got shared. Hot meals got carried door to door. The cleanup stretched on for weeks, and through all of it, the region did what it has always done best, which is take care of its own.

The trees took the longest to heal. Tens of thousands of them were damaged or destroyed, and Western New York spent years afterward replanting what the October Surprise took, street by street and park by park. If you walk certain neighborhoods now, the younger trees standing among the old giants are quiet monuments to that night.

Twenty Years On

Two decades later, the October Surprise lives on in two places, the record books and the collective memory of nearly a million Western New Yorkers who lived through it. It is the storm people still reach for when they want to explain to a newcomer what this region is capable of handling. It was sudden, it was destructive, and it was, in the end, survived, the way Buffalo tends to survive things, together and with a chainsaw in hand. Every autumn when the forecast gets a little weird and the leaves are still hanging on, somebody around here says it out loud. Remember the October Surprise. We always will.