NEW YORK: After dumping possibly record-breaking amounts of snow on cities and towns east of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario for days, parts of New York finally got a breather on Sunday.
Although many travel restrictions were lifted and many highways reopened, many businesses in the hardest-hit areas remained closed. However, bands of lake-effect snow were forecast to bring up to 2 feet (0.6 metres) of snow by Monday morning in some areas of the state that had been largely spared in earlier rounds.
"This storm has been historic. Without a question, this will go down in history," New York Governor Kathy Hochul stated at a press conference on Sunday.
On Thursday, snow started to fall in the villages south of Buffalo. By Saturday, the National Weather Service had measured 72 inches in Natural Bridge, a hamlet close to Watertown at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, and 77 inches (196 cm) in Orchard Park, home of the NFL's Buffalo Bills.
However, the severity of the storm on Friday seemed to put the state's record for the greatest snowfall in a day in jeopardy: the 50 inches (127 cm) that fell in Camden, New York, on February 1, 1966. Similar multiday storms have brought larger snowfall totals to New York in the past.
Jason Alumbaugh, a Buffalo-based meteorologist for the National Weather Service, said it was too soon to judge whether any of this year's snowfalls broke that record.
Hochul is requesting that the impacted districts be declared a catastrophe by the federal government, which would allow for the release of some relief. She said that in regions where there was enough snow to potentially cause roofs to collapse, teams were checking on occupants of mobile home parks.
A Sunday football game between the Buffalo Bills and the Cleveland Browns was shifted to Detroit due to heavy snowfall.
Lake-effect snow, which is created by chilly air picking up moisture from warmer water and releasing it in bands of windblown snow over land, is nothing new to New York.
This month's storm is at least the worst in the state since November 2014, when 7 feet (2 meters) of snow fell in some areas south of Buffalo over three days, toppling roofs and detaining traffic on a stretch of the New York State Thruway.