Heavy-hitting snowstorm causes travel problems in Colorado

AccuWeather

AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live from Colorado, where snow caused serious problems for the southern part of the state on Jan. 30.

Transcript

00:00Heavy snow hammered parts of eastern Colorado earlier and while the snow is

00:04winding down, just like we showed you, it made for a messy morning.

00:08Active weather meteorologist Tony Laubach has been in the thick of the snow storm and he

00:12joins us live in Colorado Springs with the latest. Tony, how are we doing out there?

00:16Well, Jeff, we are doing much, much better now compared to what we were

00:22doing just even a couple of hours ago. This was a really heavy-hitting storm

00:27for portions of the eastern Colorado, from Colorado Springs all the way out

00:31into the eastern plains. Most of Denver got away with this one. In fact, my last

00:36live hit I pretty much did right under the northern edge where it was snowing

00:41like the Dickens about five miles to the south. You went five miles north, the sun

00:45was out. So a lot of folks on the northern half of the state have no idea

00:49that this is what a good chunk of the Centennial State looks like and it

00:54really made a mess. We're going to take you out to I-70. This was one of several

00:58major wrecks that had I-70 closed in multiple areas. The interstate itself did

01:04not endure a long-distance shutdown. We see that a lot of times when you talk

01:08about a hundred, two hundred miles of the interstate closed. These were really

01:11spaced out closures due to wrecks that were just totally blocking lanes. We had

01:16this accident here. This was just outside of Lyman on the west side of Lyman. One

01:20of two jackknife semis, or actually two, within about three miles of each other

01:24that had various portions of I-70 eastbound blocked. You got up closer to

01:29Denver toward Watkins. There was another semi that had blocked both of the

01:33westbound lanes. So folks trying to get into Denver from areas like Bennett, Deer

01:38Trail had to take alternate routes to get around that accident. So that was a

01:41big issue for us as well. As we got down later into the afternoon, the storm

01:45started to wind down. The sun came out, but you wouldn't know it in some cases

01:50because we were talking ground blizzard conditions along US-24 from Lyman to

01:54Colorado Springs. There were points where you were in whiteout conditions and when

01:58the wind would lighten up a little bit, you could look above you and see blue

02:01skies. Those ground blizzards are very, very deceptive because there's not a

02:05whole lot of snow falling. It's just the wind on the backside of this system

02:08blowing the snow that fell today. Talking in terms of accumulations, this is not

02:13going to be a historic storm. It's probably not gonna be one a lot of folks

02:16remember here, but it doesn't matter because I still bring the trusty yard

02:20stick out. We're gonna find out here on the north side of Colorado Springs about

02:24what we're looking at here in this parking lot, which looks reasonably

02:27untouched. And we're sitting at about five inches of snow here on the north

02:31side of Colorado Springs between Colorado Springs and Monument. So a

02:35pretty decent bit of snow. You get out a little further east, you're probably

02:39talking drifts in the two to three feet range. So that is certainly gonna be

02:43something they're gonna be dealing with here for the rest of the day. The good

02:45news is the storm working its way on out of here. And you talked about a

02:49little birdie told me that today is thursday and we all know that. But as we

02:54get into saturday and sunday sixties,

03:00does this look like it's gonna be sixties in 48 hours? Because that's

03:03what's gonna happen. You gotta love colorado man. That is what colorado does

03:07best. Huge temperature swings during the cold season. Yep, there you go. Your

03:12neck of the woods, tony, you gotta love it, huh?

03:15All right, tony, thanks for that report. Good stuff.

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