- A car dealer dragged a generator for four hours through the snow to power a shelter in Buffalo, NY.
- Vive Shelter was without power for 27 hours after Buffalo was hit by a blizzard.
When a Buffalo, New York, shelter was without power for 27 hours during last week's killer blizzard, its founder phoned a friend for a potentially life-saving favor.
Friday's winter storms, which killed at least 27 people, cut the power in Vive Shelter's rundown building just five hours into the deadly storm, Chief Program Officer at Jericho Road Community Health Center Anna Mongo told Insider.
Temperatures quickly dropped in the shelter as the windchill outside hit well below zero degrees Fahrenheit and the boiler stopped working without electricity.
In the shelter's history, they have never lost power, Mongo said.
"While you always know that's a possibility, I'm not sure that's the thing that felt most real in our preparations," she said.
The shelter had made sure there was enough food for all 150 people staying there and that they all had the medication they needed in case they got stuck inside.
But for the next 27 hours, Vive had no power, leaving its residents cold and in the dark.
At first, there was an attempt to problem-solve, leading to "three or four iterations of people trying to drive in with four-wheel drive, with high-power vehicles" to bring them a generator, including the company's CFO, who offered his generator for the shelter to use.
But the CFO, and everyone else who tried, quickly got turned around because of the weather.
That's when Myron Glick, the founder and CEO of Jericho Road Community Health Center, decided it was time to reach out to a good friend who might be able to help: Scott Bieler, the CEO of West Herr Automotive Group.
Bieler initially sent a team of electricians and a generator to the shelter on a truck, but, according to Mongo they couldn't make it because the roads were too bad.
"I was really stressed out," Glick told local news outlet WIVB4.
Mongo said they all thought that was it, until Bieler called him back with a new solution, determined to get Vive's power up and running.
"Scott called me again and said, 'We found a payloader — one of those big tractors with a scoop on the front — we're going to drag our generator into town on this payloader,'" Glick told WIVB4.
Bieler followed through on his promise.
According to Jericho Road Community Health Center's Facebook page, Bieler's team dragged the generator — and a 10-gallon tank of diesel, Mongo said — through the snow from Hamburg, New York, to the shelter in Buffalo. The 15-mile journey took them four hours to complete as "the roads in Buffalo are almost impassable due to the deep snow and many abandoned vehicles along the way," Vive said on Facebook.
Mongo said it took an additional 30 minutes to get the generator up and running, but that once it was working, they didn't lose heat or power again. The electricity to the building was restored on Monday afternoon.
Mongo said initially they thought that the power was going to be fixed right away because reports on the power company's website that promised restored electricity that afternoon kept them optimistic. When, later Friday, it became clear there were no emergency services or police officers in the city, the team at Vive knew they had to start sourcing a generator.
Glick told WIVB 4 that it could have been another 27 hours without power had Bieler not come to the rescue.
"We are deeply grateful for this act of love by Scott and his entire team," Jericho Road Community Health Center's Facebook page said. "We are also grateful for our Jericho Road Staff members, including the VIVE Director, Matt Tice, who are putting in these long hours staying on duty at VIVE."
Vive Shelter houses refugees either looking to apply for US asylum or awaiting their appointments with the Canadian Border Service.
According to the shelter's website, Vive is currently over capacity. There are 150 people living there from around 15 different countries, according to Jericho Road Community Health Center's Facebook page.
Mongo told Insider that about 15 people were scheduled to leave over the weekend, but were stuck in the storm. Additional families showed up during the storm, too, who the shelter couldn't turn away.
"Having someone like Scott who just wasn't going to give up until we got [a generator], I think that's rare," Mongo told Insider. "I think a lot of people didn't and don't have that kind of resource."