It’s been snowing in Buffalo, New York.
And snowing. And snowing. And snowing and snowing and snowing and snowing.
So much snow fell that the city’s government had to ban driving—throughout the whole city. Not that cars could really get around, anyway.
The snow started on Tuesday and it just kept coming. On top of the 1.7 metres of snow that had fallen by Wednesday, residents of Buffalo found woke up to up to 90 centimetres more that had fallen overnight.
Buffalo sometimes gets hit by a lot of snow in the winter, but this was out of the ordinary.
While the snow may be fun for kids, it is causing a lot of problems.
Some roofs of large buildings like stadiums are in danger of collapsing under the weight of the snow and have to be carefully shovelled off.
In some cases, emergency vehicles can’t reach people—and in one case, a woman had to give birth in a fire station because she couldn’t get to a hospital.
Some other people got stuck trying to drive in the snow, and ended up having to spend the night in their car. However, everyone was later rescued.
Delivery trucks couldn’t get through the snow to get supplies to restaurants and corner stores.
The good news for people in Buffalo came Wednesday afternoon, when the sun came out.
But even that may pose a problem. All of the snow that has been built up will begin to melt, which may cause some flooding.
CURRICULUM CONNECTIONS
By Kathleen Tilly
Writing/Discussion Prompt
This article highlights all of the problems that the snow has caused for people in Buffalo. Do you think there were any positive parts of the snowfall? What could they have been?
Reading Prompt: Text Patterns
All texts, including newspaper articles, are organized in a specific way. They are organized to help the reader understand the information easily.
This article is written using a cause and effect pattern. This means that the article explains the cause of something and the effect it had. The cause in this article is the snowstorm. What were the effects of the snowstorm in Buffalo?
Junior
Identify a variety of organizational patterns in a range of texts and explain how they help readers understand the texts (OME: Reading, 2.2).
Intermediate
Analyse increasingly complex texts to identify organizational patterns used in them and explain how the patterns help communicate meaning (OME, Reading, 2.2).
Language Feature: Sentences of Different Lengths
Journalists write using sentences of different lengths in order to communicate meaning. For example, why do you think the journalist chose to write two short sentences and then a longer one in the following paragraph: “And snowing. And snowing. And snowing and snowing and snowing and snowing.”
How would this information be communicated differently if the sentence simply said, “It kept snowing for a long time in Buffalo.”
