My family didn’t move to rochester until 92 so I didn’t experience that but I’ve heard many stories and the after effects are remanescent in my backyard.
However my parents house has this werid knack of getting hit by disasterous stuff almost on an every other year basis. The 3 worst things I can remember were two microbursts (1 we lost power for a week) and one ice storm in 2002 (not even sure if it effected buffalo at all).
The ice storm in 2002 in April was just like the sitation in buffalo except with ice. My parents house was about 28 degrees for more than a week about 8 days until the power came back on and there was no where to go. Everybody was in a mad scramble to buy generators and anything you would need in a sitation like that it was nuts. It was a pretty shity experience to say the least though, stuff in my room started icing over and the only way to stay warm at night was to sit like within 4 ft from the fireplace. What I remember distinctly though was the highlight of that whole week which was watching the cuse championship basketball game on a little black and white battery operated tv.