I live in upstate New York in one of the snowiest cities in the country. Last winter, we got almost 200 inches of snow. Here we expect it and the various communities are prepared for it. Even the smallest villages have snow fighting equipment. The roads stayed open and the airport closed once for a total of about fifteen minutes. People go about their business. Sometimes schools will close, but most often it's not because of the snow, but because of the cold. If the wind chill is 20 below, people don't want their kids standing outside waiting for the school bus. DirecTV still works, speaking for myself, I've never had a snow related outage. You also never see dish covers or heaters around here.
The key to this is preparation. That's a lot of the trouble when a big storm hits further down the east coast. They don't have the experience of equipment to effectively deal with that sort of thing. I'm not blaming anyone because it just doesn't make a lot of sense for a city that normally gets a few inches of snow a year to invest tens of millions on heavy snow equipment. Of course, if these kinds of storms start becoming a pattern, a lot of public officials may have to start thinking about it.