Travelers stranded in snowy eastern Colorado reflect on “rough couple of days” on the highways

By Alan Gionet

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    Colorado (KCNC) — Days after taking refuge from the pounding of a winter storm, stranded travelers are looking at more trouble ahead on the Eastern Plains.

“I started out at Aurora it took me four hours to get here. Yeah, long time,” said Laura Zucker, a traveler headed back to Kansas, who made it only about 90 miles to Limon. “I’ve been here since Wednesday morning,” she added.

Seated in the La Quinta Inn lobby with other stranded travelers, it was not unpleasant. It was kind of like a vacation, she laughed.

“That’s what my husband said, he said, ‘Enjoy the vacation,'” she explained. “But it’s turned into one with all the friends that we’ve made.”

CDOT closed the highway about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning and while some of the westbound highway west of Limon was open Wednesday and Thursday, eastbound was nearly permanently closed because of stuck semis and cars.

“The wetness makes it really slick, especially on the hills. There’s no chain restrictions or anything out here on I-70,” explained Colorado State Patrol Capt. Clint Rushing, commander of Troop 3 on the Plains. “So the semi-trucks aren’t really required to drive it with chains and so they get out here and they get stuck in these hills. And we get one semi-truck stopped and another one stops, and then, before you know it, I can have, you know, 5, 10, 15 miles of semi-trucks and passenger cars.”

The Colorado Department of Transportation and Colorado State Patrol officers worked together to reach stuck cars and trucks. There were no injuries but some vehicles were stranded in areas that were dealing with deep drifts. People were running out of cellphone batteries and water.

“Some folks have run out of food and fuel, which, kind of upped our priority on this, and we had to break some plows off of I-70,” Rushing said, which meant slowing the recovery of highway conditions.

Dozens of cars and trucks were stuck not only on the highway from Limon east to Burlington near the Kansas line.

“It’s been a rough couple of days,” said Rushing.

CDOT managed to get the highway open again Thursday night during a lull in the storm, but there was likely a lot more trouble ahead, particularly with forecasts calling for snow measured in feet. In Limon, some people chose to stay, not make a run for it, including Zucker. She planned to stay put and ride out the next rounds of bad weather. C-DOT expects significant closures ahead, possibly for days of duration.

Rushing pointed out that people have gotten into trouble by following map apps that take them onto side roads to try to get around highway closures. Some of those roads put them in bad situations. Many believe the Eastern Plains are flat land, but that’s not the case at all, says Rushing.

Truckers who are not prepared end up in big trouble.

“When they start climbing and they lose that traction, that’s it. And then one parks, and then the next one parks, and the next one parks, and then and then the problem behind that is that we can’t get any CDOT plows through there. So then that snow just drifts and builds up, and then the ice comes back and sand’s not flowing, and it just makes a bigger mess.”

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