Buffalo October 2006 Storm Gallery - Page 14

The Buffalo News, the local daily newspaper owned by Warren Buffett, has a website, but it was no help. It's site that is only updated once a day, at 9:00 a.m. If a major disaster hits any time after that, the website won't have any information about it until the next day. Reporters on the paper say that Stanford Lipsey, friend of Buffett, doesn't believe a web site is worth the money, & is not sympathetic to the digital age. But the Buffalo News web page was even worse than usual this weekend. The site went haywire Friday night. The index column, usually on the left of the screen, came up in the middle of the screen. If you clicked on any of the options, you'd see a flash of the page for less than a second, then the screen reverted to the centralized index. So nobody could get to see anything and, apparently, nobody working at One News Plaza all weekend either knew how to fix it, or cared to.

By Sunday, all over town you could hear the up and down whine of chainsaws, sometimes singing duets or trios, common in the suburbs but rare within the cityline. By afternoon, there were neat piles of branches in front of many houses. It was a clear blue day, with only occasional tufts of cloud here and there, and the temperature was in the mid-fifties, easy weather for working outdoors.