On October 12, I was sitting in my living room at around 4 p.m. watching TV when my husband, Nick, called me from work "Look out the window," he urged me.  I stood up and looked outside.  It was snowing big, heavy snowflakes.  I didn't think much of it though.  When you live in Buffalo, New York, like I do, seeing some flakes in October is a pretty common occurrence.  However, it continued to snow, and I began to worry about my husband getting home.  He works about a half hour away, and the storm was decidedly worse up by his office.  I went outside and looked at my plants, but they all seemed ok.  I shook the heavy snow off of our little trees (we just built a house two years ago) and went back inside to hunker down. Finally, around 7 p.m., Nick walked in.  It had taken him an hour to get home because the snow had come so fast and so heavily that the plows weren't able to get out before the evening rush.

I made dinner, and at 9 p.m., his company called.  Nick is an IT guy, and the office had lost power, leaving the data center running on generator power. I didn't want Nick to travel by himself, as we'd heard there were limbs and power lines coming down all over the place, so we set off together for his office.

We were there for three hours.  I'll spare you the gory details about that.  Suffice it to say that I ran all over a building I've only been in a few times, in the pitch black dark, looking for fans to cool the data center.  Such is the life of the wife of the "IT guy".  When we got outside at midnight, we could hear the eerie sounds of branches breaking all around us, and we could see the neon fireworks created from transformers blowing up.

We made our way on surface roads for a while, dodging fallen limbs and power lines, getting detoured every few blocks by police and fire crews, until we decided that getting on the NYS Thruway might be a better plan.  It was a very bad idea!  We got stuck on the Thruway until 9:30 a.m. the next morning.  I will also spare you the details about what sitting in your car, not moving for 9 hours is like, with tractor trailers jack-knifed in front of you and cars off the road as far as the eye can see.  I counted over two dozen transformers within my sight blowing up as we sat there.  In the morning, after a few other brave souls made a path through the destruction, we decided to put our CR-V in 4-wheel drive and try to slalom our way home.  What we saw when we got home amazed us.  We have three trees, and thankfully, two survived with very little damage.  The little poplar tree that the builder put in didn't fare as well though.  Both of its main branches were broken about five feet from the ground.  We'll have to remove that tree in the spring.  My autumn joy sedum also didn't fare well.  The stalks had been weighed down so heavily by the snow that they snapped about six inches from the ground.  The foliage of my irises was lying haphazardly, plastered to the ground.  As I assessed the damage, I was grateful that this was all we had.  Everywhere around us, it looked horrendous.  Many people who have lived through tornados said the area looked like a tornado had hit it. 

The power was out all over County, 360,000 homes in all.  Our power was also out, and we had no idea when it went out.  Thankfully, we were able to keep warm using our gas fireplace. We brought a futon mattress up from the basement and slept in front of the fire for three nights. Our power was out for 96 hours, and we were actually one of the lucky ones.

We bought a generator on Sunday morning, and our neighbor's uncle pumped out our sump pump twice on Saturday.  Our basement would have flooded pretty badly if not for him.  It was 55 degrees on Saturday, just two days after the storm had begun, and the snow was melting quickly.  Thousands of homes flooded.  Some people had no power for a week and a half, and even then, Verizon was working to restore phone service to some of the hardest-hit areas. 

The hardest-hit objects in this storm were the mature trees in and around Buffalo, particularly the larger-leaved varieties like maples and oaks.  Officials from the National Arbor Day Foundation estimated that 90% of the mature trees in the City of Buffalo sustained damage, and that 30-40% would have to be removed.  Relatively speaking, the houses around Buffalo were spared, but the city is being declared an ecological disaster.  As a result, the landscape around Buffalo will be changed for years to come.

Buffalo is an amazing city.  The people pulled together and got through it, as usual.  We never asked for pity - we just got to work digging out.  We dragged the branches and trees to the curbs, we hauled them off the streets, our houses and our cars.  Most people went back to work on Monday, October 16, even if they had no power at home.  The Sabres even played a hockey game Saturday night!  The players didn't know what to expect because city officials had only lifted the state of emergency a few hours before the game.  When the players heard the crowd screaming outside their locker room, were informed that the game was a sellout and that the fans were streaming in, they got together and said, "If 19,000 fans can come out in this, we'd better give them a show."  They won 7-4.

Our power companies, National Grid and New York State Electric and Gas, were phenomenal. Apparently, after Hurricane Katrina, many of the power companies made a pact to provide help wherever needed, and power crews from as far away as Colorado arrived remarkably quickly to help restore power. Crews from the Boston area were on their way Thursday night as the storm was still unfolding, because the power companies knew they wouldn't have enough spare transformers.  Power crews were greeted as heroes wherever they went.

This particular storm was so bad because most of the leaves on the deciduous trees had not dropped yet.  When the snow started falling and then piling up, the weight of the very wet, slushy snow caused the leaves to droop and finally for entire branches - even entire trees - to fall.  Trees were also uprooted in the hardest-hit areas, as the wind picked up on Friday, October 13^th.  My advice, should you ever be faced with an imminent winter weather situation, is, of course, take care of your family first and ensure their safety, then do what you can to mitigate the plant damage.  Cut down foliage, wrap trees and shrubs . . . almost anything will do to wrap them for a short time.  Shake the limbs of your trees off if they're being pounded by snow, ice, hail or wind. You may feel like an idiot standing there with a broom whacking at your tree while the wind and debris are assailing you, but it will go a long way to help in preserving what you've worked so hard to achieve.

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Amanda Twentyfive (Manda903) is a GardenHere member and one of our volunteer journalists.  To the extent that it is possible, all GardenHere articles are written, photographed and edited by GardenHere members.

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