Local Firefighters Recall 'Buffalo Mutual Aid' After Blizzard of 1977

This past weekend’s historic blizzard in Buffalo, which dumped more than 70 inches of snow in just 24 hours, echoed more than 500 miles away on the East End, with some local firefighters for whom it recalled the “longest mutual aid ever” more than four decades ago.

In February 1977, Buffalo was hit by another historic blizzard that dumped more than 100 inches of snow over three days, with 60 mph winds whipping it into drifts three stories high in some places. The city’s fire department was overwhelmed by the conditions — some of its trucks became stranded while out on calls, and others simply froze, the water in their hoses and pumps freezing solid.

Governor Hugh Carey put out an emergency call statewide for fire departments everywhere to send equipment and crews to help Buffalo. Of particular need were four-wheel-drive vehicles, and especially “pumpers,” as the trucks with powerful water pumps on them to power fire hoses are known.

The fire departments in East Hampton, Springs and Montauk had exactly the sort of vehicles that were needed. Less than 48 hours after Carey’s call for help went out, three vehicles, each with two firefighters aboard, were being loaded onto military planes at the air base at Gabreski Airport in Westhampton.

“My father-in-law at the time was chief, and he called up and said, ‘Hey, you wanna go up to Buffalo?’ And I said, ‘What? Hell no, I don’t want to go to Buffalo. They’re having a blizzard up there.’” David Browne, now 81, recalled with a snicker. “Well, he said I was going. And so I said, ‘I bet Tommy Tillinghast will go,’ and I called up Tommy and we met at the firehouse the next day — and off we went to Westhampton.”

The Air National Guard was mobilized to help deliver equipment to Buffalo, and a C-141 awaited the arrival of the East End’s crews at Gabreski Airport. East Hampton Fire Department sent its purpose-built Ford pumper, Springs Fire Department an International Harvester pickup that had been converted to a pumper, and Montauk an old World War II weapons carrier that the department had fitted with a powerful pump.

Aboard that first flight were Browne and Tillinghast from East Hampton, Fred Overton and Bob Davis from Springs, and Peter Joyce and Frank Ward from Montauk.

“We had no idea what we were in for,” Peter Joyce says now. “We couldn’t fly into the airport in Buffalo, so they sent us to a base in Niagara, and when we landed the pilot told us that he couldn’t stop all the way or he’d get stuck, so he was just going to lower the back and we would drive off while the plane was still moving. So that started us right off with some excitement.”

Joyce had graduated from SUNY Osewgo just five years earlier, so he had an inkling of the kind of cold that the men might see. He and Ward brought insulated coveralls that Montaukers would buy at Herb’s Market in those days. The coveralls were made for meat market workers in New York City, and Herb’s would get them though one of their meat purveyors.

Once they had landed, the three local trucks were escorted into Buffalo by the National Guard and scattered, dispatched to separate firehouses around the city.

“I had never seen that much snow,” Overton recalled this week. “If I said 25-foot drifts, I wouldn’t be exaggerating. It was impossible to get down some streets.”

Drifts were reported by local papers from the time to have been measured as high as 30 feet. “They reached almost to the top of the telephone poles,” Browne said.

Once in place, the firefighters’ duties were humdrum at times, strenuous at others. The Montauk truck was stationed at a firehouse near the Buffalo airport and would make daily runs there with firefighters from the station. The Springs truck was sent to a station on the Buffalo River, then to the downtown across the street from the hockey arena where the Buffalo Sabres played at the time.All the firefighters said they spent a lot of time digging, and traveling around the city to places that their 4x4 trucks could get to and others couldn’t.

“Our first assignment was to take around a city photographer so he could get pictures,” Davis said. “We were going down this road, it was a single lane with 12- or 18-foot drifts on each side, no place to turn around. And the photographer, he asked us if we knew where we were, and we said, ‘Nope, not a clue,’ and he said, ‘Well, this is Interstate 90.’”

“There weren’t many fire calls — I think we only actually had one the week that I was there — so we mostly spent the days just finding our way around the city, helping the Buffalo Fire Department dig out cars and fire hydrants,” added Overton. “The police and fire department were using snowmobiles to get around the city and find stranded cars and dig them out to make sure there wasn’t anybody in them. The snow was so deep they’d be on top of the cars, and dig down to them.”

The out-of-towners got funny looks from the Buffaloians right off the bat, because they stood out in their fire engine red trucks. Buffalo’s firetrucks were all painted a neon yellow at the time.

“They put us in Polishtown, and one day we were out digging out a fire hydrant and someone came out of a store and asked who we were, and we told them we were volunteers from Long Island,” Browne recalled. “Well, they took us inside and gave us kielbasa and all sorts of things to take back to the firehouse to eat. Everybody was very nice up there.”

All three of the two-man crews spent seven days in Buffalo before they were spelled by a second shift from each of the departments — Brian King and Freddie Card from East Hampton, John Tilley and Arthur Rama from Springs, and John Lakeman and Ron Ostoff from Montauk. The first crews were flown home on a private jet chartered by the state. The second crews drove the vehicles back down, the firefighters said, since the state of emergency had been lifted and there was no funding approved for a return airlift.

The experience was a proud one for the firefighters and for the departments. The firefighters were honored by the local American Legion halls — a local business donated a buffalo head, which now hangs in the East Hampton Village Emergency Services Building, above a plaque honoring the firefighters who went on the “Buffalo Mutual Aid.”

“It was a great experience for us,” said Overton, who had been a founding member of the Springs Fire Department in 1965. “I was there for my birthday, February 8, I was a young man, I would have been 31, and my daughter was born in ’72, so she was only 5, but my wife said go. There was a lot of satisfaction in being able to go up there and help out.”

Beyond the pride of duty, for volunteer firefighters, who respond to fires from their homes and places of business, the Buffalo tour of duty was a glimpse into what the lives of professional full-time firefighters was like — including one of the most iconic symbols of a firefighter’s life.

“The firehouse had a pole, which we’d never gotten to use before, so we got to learn how to slide down it,” Joyce recalled with a chuckle that still belied the boyhood-like glee the experience must have elicited at the time. “How often does a volunteer fireman get to live in a firehouse and see the 24-hour shift life? We were like professional firemen for that week. It was an adventure.”