A Lifeline

by Mark Scott

It was a Monday morning like this morning. I was taking my son to school when I noticed the dark sky along the western horizon. It caught me by surprise, because during wintertime you never see the skies that dark. I went to my usual workout at the YMCA and came to work at WBFO, and it wasn't bad. But I remember saying, "I'd better back my car in, just in case the storm gets bad and I need to get out." It started getting bad right away.

When our satellite dish gets too much wet snow, it affects the signal, so once a storm we might have to go out and sweep the dish. Well, I went out that morning for the first of what would turn out to be six times sweeping the dish. I even had to get a ladder to clean out the top. Throughout the day, the storm got worse. We started getting reports of closings and cancellations. Still, it was just another winter storm. We get these. We're Buffalo.

We ran the Florida Supreme Court hearing about the presidential election. I took breaks to give local information but didn't disrupt the format too much. Then my own family became a concern. My wife was inching her way down Kensington Avenue. We didn't know where my son was. Turns out he forgot his keys and was sitting on the front stoop waiting for his mother. Finally, a neighbor said, "Come on over," and he went over there. Once I found out that he was okay and that my wife was on her way home, I felt a little better.

We opened up the phone lines here at 4:50, because something told me that this storm was going to be rough. We took calls, pre-empting "All Things Considered" until 5:00, and then we went back to the show because of the importance of the Florida hearing. At 5:30, we took more calls, and people were saying, "It's bad" they were stuck, giving us the first flavor of what was to happen.

At 7:00 I tried to head home. I got into the car and tried to shovel my way out. Two hearty souls had to push me out. As I inched my way along Main Street, I noticed just how bad it was - cars stopped, trucks stuck and finally I couldn't move, just past Eggert. We had started our overnight automation service earlier in the evening. It hit me that in the storm hubbub I forgot to program a couple of key parts for the overnight, which meant we would have been off the air as of 9:00. So I turned around and came back, and I opened up for calls.

I was here alone, which made it technically challenging, but I set it up and started hearing from people that the mainline thruway was backed up, the 190, local streets clogged, traffic in major gridlock. This was the kind of storm that we hadn't seen. There were three feet of snow in December '95, but that happened on a Sunday. We were all home, so it didn't have the impact that this storm had.