BUFFALO, N.Y. — People from Buffalo hear it all year over the phone or while traveling: “Buffalo? Got snow there?”
The answer, still: “Why, yes!”
Two piles remain in a lot where trucks dumped it after a freak November storm buried neighborhoods in so much snow — 7 feet fell in spots — that crews had nowhere else to put it.
“I tell my customers; ‘You want ice cubes? Go get them,’ ” Eugene Kiszelewski, who owns the G&T Inn across the street, said Tuesday as the temperature climbed past 80 degrees.
At its height, Kiszelewski said, the snow mounds towered over streetlight poles.
Between 10,000 and 11,000 truckloads were taken there, Streets Commissioner Steven Stepniak said, creating a mountain of snow five stories high.
One of the leftover piles is about the size of two school buses end to end, while the other is a bit smaller. Gray-white ice peeks through, but both piles resemble earthen berms, because the snow is covered with a thick layer of dirt and grass.
The surrounding land is swampy, proof that the snow is slowly melting, even in Buffalo, which has a usually overblown reputation for snow.
New York state climatologist Mark Wysocki said the dirt cover is insulating the compacted snow, drawing out the time it is taking for the warmth of the sun to reach it. The ground, meanwhile, is heating the snow berm from below.
“It’s sort of like an Oreo cookie right now,” Wysocki said, “in which you’ve got snow in the middle, and heat from above and heat from below, and it’s slowly eating away at the snow.”
Just how long it will stick around, Wysocki said, depends on the thickness of the covering layer.
Boston just saw the last remnants of its ruthless winter snow melt away earlier this month. Buffalo’s snow, however, could “be there when the next snow falls,” Wysocki said.
