Snow covered the area around Buffalo, New York, this weekend. The Buffalo Bills football team hired fans to help dig out its snow-filled Highmark Stadium. The storm pushed the game against the Pittsburg Steelers from Sunday to Monday.
Logan Eschrich joined the shovel crew. About 85 people worked together. Winds whipped at 30 miles per hour. Snow fell at a rate of two inches per hour on Sunday.
Some bleacher seats were entirely buried by the frozen fluff. Mr. Eschrich says that it was dangerous to walk just a few blocks to the stadium. Officials told people around Buffalo to stay home.
“It would have been absolutely impossible [to play]. We could barely see the next row down from us,” Eschrich said on Sunday. “We made progress shoveling, but not much at all.”
Why does the Buffalo area get so much snow? It is next to Lake Erie. Other Great Lakes are nearby. Cold air moves over the warmer lake water. The air picks up moisture from the lakes. Big clouds form and dump lots of snow. That’s called the lake effect.
Former Bills player Eric Wood remembers his first lake-effect storm in Buffalo in 2014. The storm dumped nearly seven feet of snow over four days. Mr. Wood had to be picked up by a snowmobile to get to work!
Meanwhile, the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins played one of the coldest games in NFL history in Missouri.
The temperature for the Saturday game was four degrees below zero. The wind made it feel more like minus 27 degrees.
(The coldest game ever was negative 13 degrees for the 1967 NFL championship. The wind chill that day was minus 48 degrees.)
Some brave fans bundled up in parkas, snow pants, and ski goggles. The Chiefs handled the cold better than the visitors from Florida. They beat the Dolphins 26-7.
The weather probably put a chill into the Dolphins. It was 86 degrees in Miami when the players left. It was 10 degrees with a wind chill of minus 6 in Missouri when they arrived. That’s an almost 100-degree difference!
[God] gives snow like wool; He scatters frost like ashes. He hurls down His crystals of ice like crumbs; who can stand before His cold? — Psalm 147:16-17
