This week marks the 47 year anniversary of the 1977 blizzard that buried Buffalo, detailed in “Declaring Disaster: Buffalo’s Blizzard of ’77 and the Creation of FEMA” by Timothy W. Kneeland. The following is an excerpt from “Declaring Disaster.”
January 28, 1977, began as just another Friday morning for people across western New York. The temperature was expected to be twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit, and after a series of heavy snow flurries that beset the region on Thursday, Friday beckoned with the promise of the last day of the workweek. The morning was clear, and people went about their day’s business—working, attending school, shopping, keeping appointments, running errands—only to be caught in a full-scale blizzard that erupted just after 11:00 a.m.
Drivers on the roads encountered walls of snow that obliterated their vision. Cars and buses stopped, then quickly became stranded as whiteout conditions or accidents made travel impossible. It took hours to get through a few city blocks, and many realized they would not be able to safely get out of the storm. They abandoned their vehicles but nearly froze in temperatures that had dropped to zero and wind chills that approached negative seventy degrees Fahrenheit.
Wind gusts knocked people off their feet, and icy snow clung to their coats as they sought shelter, safety, warmth, and food. Some hunkered down in office buildings, firehouses, taverns, and restaurants overnight; others, especially out in rural areas, were marooned for days. At least eighteen people died as a result of the blizzard, and many more were physically injured and emotionally scarred by the experience. Others were financially harmed by the storm due to property damage, lost wages, or lost income, all of which totaled hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Blizzard of ’77 created the greatest disaster in the history of Buffalo, New York, and brought to life the frightening vision articulated a decade earlier of how a snowstorm could force an entire metropolitan region to grind to a halt. Along with Buffalo, cities including Batavia, Niagara Falls, and Watertown were paralyzed as transportation, utilities, and vital services all failed. Hundreds of thousands of people were stuck in their homes, some lacking heat, food, and medicine. Local governments faltered and failed in the ensuing crisis, and it fell to state and federal government agencies to assist the people of western and northern New York.
The scale of the disaster that hit Buffalo in 1977 was in part due to public policies that had abandoned trains and interurban rail services in favor of automobiles that were more vulnerable to snowstorms. Another factor was a weather system that blew massive amounts of accumulated snow off Lake Erie that covered the metropolitan region. This phenomenon occurred during one of the coldest Januaries in Buffalo history and also amid one of the most frigid winters of the twentieth century. Below-average temperatures gripped the United States from December 1976 through February 1977. Blizzards and heavy snowfall battered the nation, and by January 1977, two-thirds of the country was covered in snow. Even the nation’s capital suffered. Storms and cold threatened to cancel the outdoor inauguration of Jimmy Carter, who took his oath of office in temperatures hovering around the freezing mark. In Chicago, temperatures plunged to negative nineteen degrees Fahrenheit, and further south, Miami, Florida, saw the first recorded snow in its history.
The extreme cold ignited a shortage of natural gas, a crisis that had been looming since 1970. Natural gas made up one-third of all energy demand in the United States and accounted for half of the energy used outside of transportation. Over forty million homes relied on natural gas for home heating and other domestic uses, and millions of commercial and business buildings did so as well. President Gerald Ford warned the nation in August 1975 that supplies of natural gas were lagging behind demand and that a severely cold winter would turn the shortage into a crisis. Fortunately for President Ford, there were subsequently five mild winters in a row. That trend ended for President Jimmy Carter in the winter of 1976-77.

To deal with the crisis, President Carter convened a series of emergency meetings and appointed a federal energy coordinator, James Schlesinger, to oversee energy policy. Schlesinger was a seasoned administrator who had worked in both the Nixon and the Ford administrations. Carter eventually appointed him the first secretary of energy, where he worked with Congress to ration natural gas supplies and to facilitate the movement of natural gas across state lines. Since there was little the administration could do to increase the supply of natural gas, the Carter White House devised ideas for conservation and cutting back on usage, such as instituting a four day workweek for industries.
Natural gas shortages in the Mid-Atlantic states led governors in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania to invoke emergency measures to deal with the situation. They imposed natural gas rationing for businesses, industrial plants, and schools to ensure that residential homes and apartments had sufficient heat for the winter. On January 27, 1977, the governor of New York, Hugh Carey, issued a fuel emergency that curtailed natural gas for everything but essential home heating.
The emergency order closed all gas-heated schools in the state for a week. Governor Carey issued a thirty-day suspension of laws mandating minimum temperature settings in public buildings. Meanwhile, the loss of natural gas supplies led to the layoff of a hundred thousand workers in the state. In western New York, the two principal utilities, Niagara Mohawk and National Fuel Gas, cut off natural gas supplies to hundreds of industries and curtailed supplies for an additional 29,000 commercial businesses. Buffalo-area malls remained open but kept their thermostats set at the low fifties, and some stores closed their suburban branches over the weekend.
Amid the national and statewide natural gas crisis, Buffalo was experiencing one of its worst winters in recorded history. The average snowfall in Buffalo is forty-four inches of snow by late January, but in the winter of 1976–77 nearly 150 inches of snow had fallen before the end of January. By the end of the winter, Buffalo had received 199 inches of snow.
Declaring Disaster is available to order now.