Snow Piles From Epic Buffalo Storm in 2014 Still Melting

People from Buffalo hear it all year — over the phone or while traveling: “Buffalo? Got snow there?”

The answer, still: “Why, yes!”

The temperature may be in the 80s. But two snow piles remain in one lot where trucks dumped it after a November 2014 storm buried areas in so much snow — 7 feet 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 the light poles.

Between 10,000 and 11,000 truckloads were taken there, Streets Commissioner Steven Stepniak said, creating a mountain five stories high.

One of the leftover piles is about the size of two school buses end to end, the other a bit smaller. Grayish white ice peeks through, but both resemble earthen berms, because the snow is covered with a thick layer of dirt and even grass.

Just how long it will stick around, Wysocki said, depends on how thick the covering layer is.

Boston just saw the last remnants of its ruthless winter melt away earlier this month.

“It could,” Wysocki said, “be there when the next snow falls.”

This article appeared in print on page 18 of the July 29th, 2015 edition of Hamodia.