Road conditions on many streets around the Denver metro area are continuing to frustrate drivers days after a major snowstorm struck.
The problem with Denver’s city streets is the same now as it has been since the late 1970s, said Davis O’Connor, an Evergreen resident who has worked downtown through the decades.
Once the snow hits Denver’s streets, it’s likely to stay until the sun melts it away, he said. Piles of snow, ice and sludge crowd streets and scrape undercarriages.
“We can all agree that government’s job is to provide some basic services, and certainly that includes snow removal,” O’Connor said.
“Given that it’s November 29 and we’ve got another 22 days of increasingly short and increasingly cold days, I despair about whether that snow is ever going to get removed,” he added.
As much as 2 feet of snow fell across the metropolitan area Monday and Tuesday in what amounts to one of the largest snowstorms to hit northeast Colorado in years. Denver officially received 9.5 inches of snow.
In all, Denver has 68 large plows to cover 2,050 lane miles of streets other than the interstates, Nancy Kuhn, spokesperson for Denver Public Works, said in an email. An additional fleet of pickup trucks with plows covers 1,260 lane miles of residential streets.
Those residential plows worked one 12-hour shift earlier this week, Kuhn said.
The snowfall in Denver and cold temperatures that followed were significant, she wrote, and the city will “take some time to rebound,” particularly in shaded areas, which includes much of downtown.
As much as 2 inches of snow could hit Denver on Friday afternoon and into the evening, said David Barjenbruch, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. That snowfall should be brief but winds of up to 80 mph will likely follow, further complicating travel and kicking up whiteout conditions.
“We have all our drivers in at this hour, ready to work another 12-hour shift, in advance of a little more snow in the forecast today,” Kuhn wrote Friday afternoon. “They will be assigned to the main streets, available to deploy as needed.”
Live weather updates are available through the city at denvergov.org/snow and a plow tracker is available during storms at pocketgov.org/plowtracker.
