Worst Weather you've experienced in Rochester/WNY (Syracuse, Greece: power lines, hotel)

[droc31]

Here are my top 5
1.1993 Storm of the Century: Full blizzard mode from the morning of Saturday the 13th until the late afternoon of Sunday the 14th. I remember there were 12' drifts along sections of Route 31 west of Rochester that took until after Easter to completely melt.
2.Ice storm of March 1991. We were fortunate to only lose power for 3 days. Some places were in the dark for over a week.
3.The heat waves of July 1988. Triple digit heat for 2 days in metro Rochester and for nearly a week in many locations east and southeast of the city like Geneva and Seneca Falls.

4.The April 2003 Ice Storm. To me, this seemed worse than '91 maybe because I was older. Several roads in western Monroe County south of Brockport (Beadle Rd., LaDue Rd., Capen Rd. etc) were without power for 2 weeks afterward.
5.The severe weather outbreak of Labor Day 1998. Points eastward like Auburn and Syracuse got hit harder by this line of storms, but it looked like a scene from Independence Day as the storm clouds moved ashore from Lake Ontario. (Darkest daytime sky I've ever seen).

[Crazy-Cat-Lady]

Last summer's heatwave

[JWRocks]

The worst weather I can remember, although not the dates, were in the 60's & 70's and they were snow storms. I my opinion the winters have been milder since those days

[Sunnny]

I have to agree with that JWR. I thought the 70's winters were brutal!

[droc31]

I've heard from people about the winters of the 70s. There was a massive ice storm in March of '76, (comparable to the '91 and '93 storms). Wasn't the winter of 1976-77 also record cold? Almost as cold as 1981-1982. My mother remembers single digit and teen lows in the early spring of '82.

[droc31]

Originally Posted by Crazy-Cat-Lady

Last summer's heatwave

1987 and 88 were the worst for me. Probably because we didn't have AC back then. We had a family reunion in July of '88 and the temperature even up near Lake Ontario was in the high 80s. That's almost unheard of for places like Hamlin Beach or Charlotte.

[585WNY]

Those are all worthy candidates. While before my time, the Blizzard of '66 has been regarded as the heaviest snowfall our city has ever seen. WROC did a great story looking back on the storm about a decade ago that's worth a watch. I don't believe this is literally true, but growing up, my older relatives always talked about how the snow was up to the roofs of homes and as tall as the power lines. This was usually followed by a comment about how schools nowadays close over nothing.

Maybe this is recency bias, but I think the windstorm of March 2017 deserves to be mentioned as well. As I recall, it was the 3rd largest power outage by number of customers in RG&E history. My neighborhood lost several trees and driving through that thing was downright scary. The damage was comparable to that caused by the ice storms.

[HowardRoarke]

'77 was a bad winter, however '78 we had over 4' of snow in our backyard in Greece (I was in grade school).

[Sabres4evR]

Earlier in the 2000s, the Finger Lakes area froze and my family south of the Finger Lakes didn't have power for days it was so cold. Here in Monore County it was brutal too, we had to call a hotel in Syracuse who had power because it was so cold and power lines weren't conducting electricity. At the same time the snow was horrible and was difficult for the highway departments to plow. It took us 4 hours to get to the hotel in Syracuse and there it was still negative degrees but not nearly as horrible as the Finger Lakes and the Rochester area were. Fairport school here was cancelled for a couple weeks.

[droc31]

Sabres: That may have been the winter of 2002-2003. It was subzero for over a week in early January of '03, so cold the streetlights and red beacons on the radio relay masts north of West Ridge Rd near the Clarkson/Parma town line had ice pillars streaking up from them. Then came the ice storm the first Friday of April. All of far western Monroe County(including where I lived) was in the dark and there were tree branches all over the roads.