UPDATE: I-70 closure likely to last through weekend; flows trapped motorists gjsentinel.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from gjsentinel.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Chelsea Self / Post Independent
A major rock and debris flow down the Devil’s Hole drainage in Glenwood Canyon last week was largely unexpected in terms of its impact on Interstate 70, state transportation officials said Wednesday.
The massive debris flow caused by a rainstorm the evening of July 22 dumped piles of large rocks and trees into the Colorado River, damming the river and forcing it out of its channel up against the highway’s eastbound deck structure.
Concerns about the water and debris compromising the highway structure ultimately closed I-70 for the better part of two days as a result. Westbound lanes weren’t reopened until early Saturday morning, and the eastbound lanes remained closed until later that day.
Chelsea Self / Post Independent
A major rock and debris flow down the Devil’s Hole drainage in Glenwood Canyon last week was largely unexpected in terms of its impact on Interstate 70, state transportation officials said Wednesday.
, damming the river and forcing it out of its channel up against the highway’s eastbound deck structure. as a result. Westbound lanes weren’t reopened until early Saturday morning, and the eastbound lanes remained closed until later that day.
“The reason we didn’t open up the highway on Friday is because we didn’t know what the river was doing underneath the road itself,” Colorado Department of Transportation Region 3 Director Mike Goolsby said Wednesday during a media tour of the impacted area.
Hit & Run
The past two weeks, which I spent visiting friends and relatives in the Midwest, were both a monumentally welcome road trip as well as an intensive reminder that our benighted country is mired in a quagmire of unease that bounces from hateful, sometimes incendiary violence and animosity to deep-seated fears about the rampaging effects of climate change.
It was a little weird, in other words.
I loved visiting the region where I was raised, hanging out with my brother, cousins and friends in the places where I spent much of my youth. That joy was tempered, though, by the fact that my generally liberal and progressive childhood hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, is unhappily surrounded by what can only be described as a northern precinct of Trump country.
Tuesday s Black Hollow Flood that spilled into the Cache la Poudre River, destroying five homes and killing one person three others are missing likely won t be the last flood to rock the river this summer.
National Weather Service Boulder meteorologist Paul Schlatter surveyed the flood zone and said what happened from a weather standpoint wasn t an anomaly but quite typical of July afternoon thunderstorms in Colorado s mountains.
That s why he said residents and recreationists in the Poudre Canyon should pay attention to weather forecasts this summer and fall. Even more so the next two weeks because he said the forecast calls for a continual weather pattern of afternoon thunderstorm chances with monsoon moisture available for Northern Colorado.