Buffalo takes its winter off Lake Erie. Lake-effect snow loads the roof, plugs the eaves, and buries the shrubs, then a thaw sends the melt at the basement. The cold lasts. Wind off the water finds the north wall and any sash that does not sit tight. Summers turn humid, but they are not why the phone rings. This is a city of houses, not a stack of harbor masonry.
Doubles, bungalows, and older wood-frame homes with basements are the ordinary buildings. Brick is here too, usually as a house rather than a walk-up full of shared risers. Pitched roofs, furnaces or boilers, and foundations that meet a snowbank are the normal kit. A storm that would be slush by afternoon somewhere else can be a second snow here before the first one leaves. Plan for that sequence.
The failures follow the lake. Ice dams wet the attic and then the ceiling. Pipes let go on outside walls after a hard night or a house that lost heat. Windows rot at the sill where ice sat. Mice move in when the first lasting cold arrives. Spring melt tests the sump and the grade. A policy question here is about that kind of damage, not about a parapet pond on a flat roof.
Say whether you have heat tonight and whether water is still moving. Name the symptom before the history: roof stain, frozen line, dead furnace, fogged sash, mice, a bath on an outside wall, a yard that drains at the house. If the call is about your policy, have the declarations page and the deductible, and say whether a claim is already open. The street name is enough geography.
Do not borrow a walk-up script. Buffalo is snow load, a long heating season, and an older house with a basement. Pick the trade that matches what the lake winter did to that house. Pick the trade and call.