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Buffalo Blizzard | Bomb Cyclone | New York
The storm raged for days, dumping four feet of snow and packing winds as high as 70 miles per hour, an unusually catastrophic combination.
On Dec. 19, as the Christmas holiday week began, Buffalo appeared ready for another storm. Officials huddled with weather forecasters while they pulled together a small army of emergency responders, along with the plows, backhoes, salt spreaders, and ambulances needed to face the onslaught.

The next day, media blitzes warned drivers to stay off the roads.

Mark Poloncarz, the Erie County executive, expressed wary optimism. “I mean, two feet of snow is expected,” he said. He and other officials believed they were prepared.

They were wrong.

What was bearing down on Buffalo was a rare and deadly combination of wind and snow.

While Buffalo typically gets a storm that dumps two to three feet of snow every couple of years and even winds as high as 60 to 70 miles per hour, “it’s very unusual to get the two of them put together,” said Bob Hamilton, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Buffalo. On the morning of Dec. 23, he said, the winds went within minutes from 10 miles per hour up to 70.

The storm lasted four days, but the vast majority of the snow — about 36 inches out of the total 51.9 inches recorded in the Buffalo region — fell Friday into Saturday morning. “If you held your hands straight out in front of your face, you couldn’t see your hand for 30 to 36 hours,” Mr. Hamilton said.