Buffalo Rebounded Big Time After Major Storm

We made national news last night.  Once again it was for our weather, and it wasn’t really pretty.  They talked about how many inches of snow we got.  They talked about how many hours many of us were stuck in our cars after roadways had to be shut down.  There was a part of the story that people missed in other parts of the country however.

They missed the rebound.  They missed the kindness and the generosity.  They missed the work that went into getting people back to work today.

My ride home last night took me 6 hours.  It’s a ride that normally takes about a half hour.  I did my best to make fun of the situation.  I was on facebook and twitter (a lot) while I was stopped in traffic and it was easy to feel like I was the only one inconvenienced by the storm.  Obviously that wasn’t true.  There were thousands of people who got stuck in traffic just like I did.  But guess what.  The city of Buffalo is back up and running today.

We could have easily shut everything down and said that we just couldn’t do it.   But we didn’t.

We were blessed to have people working throughout the night to clear those roads so that we had an easier commute this morning.  We had plow drivers cleaning out driveways and parking lots.  We had tow truck drivers moving abandoned cars that were stuck.  There were police officers and nurses and doctors desperately trying to make it to work so that we could be safe.

We even had businesses like Winfield’s Pub in Lackawanna and Dove’s Restaurant on Abbott road handing out macaroni and cheese and soup to drivers who were stuck and had for the most part not eaten for many hours.

There were people who found themselves stuck in the snow that were suddenly being pushed out or shoveled out by complete strangers.

Sure, I was annoyed sitting in my car that long.  Sure, I got angry that we had to be in that situation.  It’s easy to think about how we were inconvenienced by the storm last night.  But as I was driving in today and saw many of the weary eyed plow drivers heading in the opposite direction, hopefully headed for their pillows, all I could think about was how lucky we were to be here.  While a storm like that set many of us back, many other parts of the country would have been shut down for days to recover.  We were back up and running early today.  We rebounded in a hurry.  And it’s thanks to the people that work and live here.