Denver airport open during storm
DENVER – As the second major blizzard in as many weeks descended Friday on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, travelers around the country worried whether the storm would prove as disruptive as its predecessor, while Denver residents nested quietly in their homes.
On top of the pre-Christmas storm that dropped 2 feet of snow on Denver last week, an additional 12 to 15 inches fell Thursday night. After a cloudy but snowless interval of several hours, the snowfall began anew late Friday, with predicted accumulation of another foot or so.
At Denver International Airport, the nation’s fifth-busiest passenger hub, several hundred flights were canceled because the bad weather forced incoming planes to go elsewhere. But unlike last week’s storm, which closed the airport for a record 45 hours and left thousands of travelers to sleep on benches and baggage carousels in the terminal, the airport did not cease operations on Friday. Managers said more than 80 percent of scheduled flights were expected to operate over the weekend.
The new storm prompted Colorado state police to close Interstate 70 from Denver to Colby, Kan., about 210 miles to the east. The same highway heading west from Denver up to the mountain ski resorts was open, but officials were urging motorists to stay away from the road except in emergencies.
Heavy snows also blocked traffic heading north from Denver toward Cheyenne, Wyo., and much of the road south to Albuquerque. For the second week in a row, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens declared a statewide disaster emergency because of snow.
Not a creature was stirring on most of the snow-blanketed streets of Denver and other cities along the Front Range of the Rockies, the urban strip running from Fort Collins to Pueblo that is home to most of Colorado’s 4 million residents. Nearly all schools, shops and offices were closed. Government offices and businesses closed Friday in Denver and other Colorado cities, extending the New Year’s weekend by a day.
Facing their second straight holiday weekend essentially trapped at home, Front Range residents cleaned out the grocery stores Thursday in the first hours of the new storm. The almost total absence of traffic on Denver streets made life a little easier for a large fleet of snowplows dispatched by Denver’s mayor, John Hickenlooper.
The highly popular mayor ran into the first major criticism of his political career this week for the city’s failure to clear snow left by the pre-Christmas storm. Facing an election for his second term next May, Hickenlooper promised residents that this weekend’s dig-out would be better than the previous effort.
“When we stumbled the first time, we were determined to get on top of it this week,” Hickenlooper said Friday. The mayor said he had augmented the city’s fleet of plows with about 80 smaller trucks.