If he’s never considered it, he may want to look at shoveling his roof off. We used to have to do it a couple times a years where we used to live in the lake effect snow belt, and we weren’t the only ones. On the days that were nice enough to do do that, I could look around and see two or three other people on their roofs doing the same thing.
Nor’easter snow is particularly wet and heavy and any significant amount of snow can collapse a roof pretty easily. It happened in our old town on occasion, and people knew better. There was one town I heard of where the DPW roof collapsed from the snow load, and THEY ought to have known better if anyone did.
You’ll be hearing reports of this happening if this keeps up much more.
As I understand it, collapses tend to happen to flat roofs. Mine has a mild slope, and didn’t seem to have all that much snow on it (maybe a foot, which is less than half of the truly dangerous 2+ feet on the deck.).
He wrote there were drifts UP TO the roof(-line).
He’s in the same area I am, so given a reasonably sound gabled roof structure, there shouldn’t be much trouble with what we have gotten - which isn’t pretty (in a sense).