Video: A Drone Shoots Hauntingly Beautiful Footage of Buffalo’s Snowstorm


James Grimaldi/YouTube

Flying personal camera-equipped drones directly over big events like the Hong Kong protests and Independence Day fireworks is becoming commonplace. Now come these amazing aerial images of Buffalo, New York, besieged by snow for the third day in a row. The Buffalo area was coated with up to six feet of snow on Wednesday and there’s been even more today. The eighth storm-related death was annouced this morning.

When the storm first set in, James Grimaldi of West Seneca, New York, sent his drone into the blizzard to film a bizarre world drained of color, and uploaded the stunning results to his YouTube channel. (Grimaldi has also posted his drone videos to his CNN’s iReport page.)

Grimaldi’s second-day video reveals the vast extent of the snow, the result of a massive “lake-effect snowfall event“. The houses now look like giant mushrooms:

And finally, posted today, a new storm bearing down on Grimaldi’s suburb:

This weekend’s forecasted rain won’t help recovery efforts. “We’re going to have a lot of water running off quickly,” the Weather Channel’s Wayne Verno told NBC News. “We’ll more than likely see some flooding.”

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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