Foot traffic was not heavier than usual Saturday morning at Paula’s Donuts’ original location on Sheridan Drive in Tonawanda.
But signs were plentiful that a sudden crush of visitors would be arriving.
“We close at noon on Monday, and we’ve already got 500 orders for eclipse doughnuts,” said Lisa Hoppel, a manager at Paula’s. “Yesterday, a guy called us from New Jersey to place an order.”
As the area’s popular doughnut shops grapple with out-of-town sweet-tooths, officials have tried to estimate how many people could flock to Western New York to experience Monday’s total solar eclipse.
Or to put it poetically, the crowds may depend on the clouds.
Niagara County officials and emergency managers have predicted up to 1 million people will come to the area, a figure heavily dependent on the final weather forecast for Monday.
“From what we’ve heard from other destinations, a lot of people wait to see what the weather will be like in certain areas. And these people, who are called eclipse chasers, will go wherever the weather is expected to be the best,” said Sara Harvey, a spokesperson for Destination Niagara USA, the tourism agency.
“So they may not have a reservation, necessarily, for a specific location. Or some of them have reservations in multiple locations, and then will cancel and just go wherever the weather’s good. So it is difficult to predict how many people are expected.”
Some of the visitor estimates are based on crowd counts from the last total eclipse visible in the United States, in 2017.
Nashville, Tenn., was the largest city in the path of totality…
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