ANGOLA, N.Y. — A powerful lake effect storm left dozens of people stranded at a Thruway rest stop south of Buffalo, creating a night of challenges for travelers.
From Monday night into early Tuesday morning, snow was falling at a rate of 3” per hour, the wind was whipping at 60mph creating a windchill of -20 degrees in the area.
Joe Chenelly, who was heading to Pittsburgh for work, left Fairport around 6 p.m.. “It was snowing pretty good but the forecast told me it was gonna be clear once I passed maybe Henrietta or Batavia,” Chenelly says.
But the conditions worsened past Buffalo, “I hit what I later found out was a 10-mile band of lake effect coming off (Lake) Erie so it got very heavy, very fast,” Chenelly explains.
He decided to stop for gas at the Angola travel plaza. “I saw a lot of cars, a tractor trailer off the road, I had about a half tank so, I decided I better get gas before, if you’re familiar with that area, after the Angola travel plaza all the way to the border, there’s no other gas stations,” Chenelly says.
The rest stop was packed with vehicles. “Immediately I can see, it was very crowded, dozens and dozens of tractor trailers parked there, a lot of them snowed over already at that point,” Chenelly noted. Chenelly found himself trapped as trucks blocked the exit. “As I was driving through I realized they were blocking access to the gas station so, I was just going to try to drive through the plaza and get back on the Thruway but then when I got back to the end I realized the trucks were actually blocking the exit too, so you couldn’t get out of the travel plaza,” he said.
Inside the rest stop, travelers prepared for a long night. “There were people who were already kind of staking out their space on benches and stuff knowing they were going to try and sleep, parents pushing chairs together for their kids and stuff,” Chenelly described.
The night took a turn when a water main froze, leaving restrooms unusable. “We’re just watching the snow come down, everyone was taking it pretty well and then someone from the facility walked around and told us all that a water main had broken and so there were no longer working restrooms,” Chenelly said.
By morning, extra crews arrived to help clear the area. “The plows had to come in and surgically remove the snow and they had a large wrecker that was able to pull these trucks that had gotten into the middle, they were stuck, the crews did an amazing job, it seemed to me to be a pretty complicated operation,” Chenelly remarked.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the NYS Thruway Authority told News10NBC, “During snowstorms and severe weather, Service Areas on the Thruway provide motorists with a safe and secure location to escape the elements until weather conditions improve. Overnight, this area along Lake Erie saw snowfall rates at more than three inches per hour, winds gusting over 60 mph and wind chills at minus 20. It’s critical that tractor trailer drivers and other vehicles decided to safely pull into the service area rather than continuing their travels during those extreme conditions.
During this storm, we prioritized the safety of the highway and then shifted significant resources to Angola this morning including a heavy duty front end loader and large blower on site to remove snow. The vast majority of vehicles were able to depart at 8 or 9 this morning and clean up continues as additional snow falls. We apologize for the lack of running water for a few hours in the overnight. Frigid temperatures caused a valve to freeze but bottled water was readily available for customers. Water was restored this morning.”
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