Editing The Post-Apocalyptic Roadmap/West NY

from western NY here. I'll admit alot of this was tl;dr (mostly because I'm too tired to, and not that it's not an intriguing idea) as my post is about to be, but a few Ideas I think I could throw around. Firstly much of western NY is in or next to some of the largest deposits of fresh water in the world (great lakes/finger lakes). I would imagine there would be a fair amount of water trade, or perhaps, in the given time frame, the beginning infrastructure of a fresh water pipeline.

western NY is also pretty much smack dab in the middle of a jet stream during some seasons, which would carry the remnants of the fallout, the causality of probably a few things. There would probably be large migrations of people coming in and out during the heavy fallout seasons (I imagine this would be true for any regions the jet stream passes through), provided there are jobs or resources to return to. One such job might be at the distillation plants being constructed to filter the exposed freshwater into potable water. Many of western NY's cities, Buffalo Rochester and Syracuse, are already fairly industrial. Rochester alone has vast industrial/chemical parks thanks to Kodak being based there. I imagine much of that could be retrofitted to produce things designed towards the current state of the governments affairs.

The Ginna nuclear plant is about 15 miles east of the center of Rochester and about 50 miles west of Syracuse. the plant is pretty far out in the boonies so no huge direct casualties after it having been nuked, but the large brunt of the fallout would head east into Syracuse. There is also another nuclear plant in Oswego, and are pretty much on the same latitude. there would be extremely heavy fallout everywhere east of lake ontario.

tl;dr Buffalo and Rochester NY are a water trading hub, as well as industrial and chemical exports. Syracuse Utica and possibly Albany are fallout zones from the razing of two nuclear power facilities.