Silverthorne police spent 22 hours this latest snowstorm directing traffic for tens of thousands of stranded travelers clogging the roads at Exit 205.
“We had officers on Highway 9 and U.S. 6 moving people that were parked in the left hand turn lane, so that helped with our local traffic,” police chief Alice Cary tells Krystal 93 news director Phil Lindeman.
Silverthorne PD always helps with closures at Exit 205, the busiest interchange in Summit. But a revised operations plan is giving officers a new way to help local traffic keep on moving.
“We strategically placed an officer on Stephen’s Way to keep that lane open and directing trucks where to park,” Cary says. “It’s keeping U.S. 6 open. That’s a contingency of our plan. And then making sure our staff was on the same page on where to park semis, keeping them off Stephen’s Way to keep local traffic flowing … last year we had semis getting stuck there because there is a slight incline.”
Cary says her officers were not an island. They had help from Colorado State Patrol, Summit County Sheriff’s Office and Dillon PD.
But even authorities were stuck playing hurry up and wait when I-70 closed six times in four days.
“It’s CDOT that’s closing (the road) and a lot of times we don’t know when that’s going to open,” Cary says. “We could get five minutes heads up or no heads up.”
Summit Sheriff Jamie Fitzsimons believes there is no silver bullet for these major snowstorm snarls.
“Summit County was never designed with a secondary road system,” FitzSimons says. “I don’t know that there is a fix. We become busier and busier, we get more dense with our living space, we get more tourist traffic up here, more people up here, and the more people hear the mountains are getting hit with snow, the traffic gets more unbelievable.”
FitzSimons gives the example of Highway 9 into Breckenridge. When that road expanded to four lanes it was supposed to cure congestion.
“And now,” he says, “It just takes more cars and gets more gridlock.”