Hamburg prepares year-round for winter storms, urges travel safety

HAMBURG, N.Y. — Parts of Western New York are seeing heavy snowfall, and the Town of Hamburg says winter storm preparation happens all year, not just when storms hit.

Sean Crotty, the town’s emergency manager, says officials meet with partners, stakeholders, and the Department of Transportation, as well as neighboring states, to develop and coordinate storm plans.

“Preparedness doesn’t just start the week before. We have blue sky meetings all year with our partners, our stakeholders. We meet with adjacent states, we meet with New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Department of Transportation, just to work out plans and to see what they’re going to do in instances where the Thruway has closures, or we have weather that’s further west of us or further east of us, so we work with them to develop our plans,” Crotty said.

After major storms, the town reviews what worked and what didn’t. One result of that process is a system that allows the highway superintendent to track snow plows in real time, showing where roads have been cleared. The information is publicly available on the highway superintendent’s Facebook page.

“He can see, up to the second where his plows are and where they’ve been. So that’s a great tool that just got implemented this past offseason,” Crotty said.

Crotty also urged drivers to give plows space, noting the difficulty of visibility in harsh winter conditions.

“Don’t Crowd the Plow because they have—they’re driving this large vehicle, and the visibility is really, really hard around it and clear skies, let alone when in white out conditions,” he said.

Residents are encouraged to follow a travel advisory and stay home if trips can wait. Crotty noted that snow conditions can change quickly, particularly with lake-effect snow.

“We really try to educate people to say, there’s a travel advisory if you can skip your trip and make it another day than do that because again like we just spoke you may be driving around down the road and a mile down the road it may be whiteout conditions and we want people to be prepared for that,” he said.

Crotty also spoke about a winter emergency kit in vehicles.

“A change of clothes, some hats, some gloves, the hands warmers, warming blankets, a cell phone charger or a battery pack for that, some water and some snacks,” he said.

He emphasized that not all drivers are equipped for winter travel.

“Not everybody has four wheel drive vehicles, you know. So it’s important that if your vehicle is not a, you know, a high clearance vehicle, you don’t have snow tires in your cars. You don’t feel comfortable driving in winter weather, that’s okay. Just stay home. Take it, you know, take a couple days pause if you can, and just sit, you know, sit a couple days and enjoy the nice views out your window,” Crotty said.

Finally, Crotty stressed community support during storms.

“It is a great community that people help each other out. That’s the important message, I think. If anything is, you know, check on your neighbors, help each other out,” he said.