Thousands remain without power
While most of the Front Range began thawing out Friday after a massive upslope snowstorm dumped feet of snow on the Denver area and nearby mountains, thousands of people still dealt with power outages, travel difficulties and other lingering impacts.
More than 113,000 people lost power as the winter storm caused hundreds of outages throughout the region, according to updated reports from Xcel Energy.
There were still 267 outages impacting more than 3,326 customers across metro Denver and the foothills on the company’s online outage map Friday night.
Most of the widespread highway and road closures from Thursday’s storm dissipated Friday, and the handful of highways and roads that were still closed Friday morning reopened throughout the day.
By Friday night, only Colorado 46 between Colorado 119 and Golden Gate Drive near Central City was still closed because of safety concerns, according to the Colorado Department of Transportation.
State troopers issued 12 citations for commercial drivers who didn’t comply with chain laws during the storm, when semi-trucks became stuck in the snow and shut down traffic on Interstate 70 and U.S. 285 for hours Thursday.
Citations can vary from $50 for not carrying chains to $1,000 for shutting down the highway
And although the State Patrol could not provide a breakdown of the citations on Friday, Sgt. Patrick Rice said most of them were for trucks blocking highways.
Troopers also responded to 100 motorist requests for assistance, which included semis stuck in the snow, Rice said.
There was less snow accumulation at Denver International Airport than most of the region, but 6 inches was enough to cause 553 delayed flights Friday, according to the flight tracking website Flightaware.
Only 29 flights were canceled Friday, a sharp contrast to the more than 800 flights that were canceled Thursday.
Storm impacts also lingered in the foothills and mountains of Boulder County, where Eldora Mountain Resort officials waded through 46 inches of snow to try to reopen the ski area. Although the resort’s reopening was delayed Friday when a six-wheel road grader got stuck clearing an access road, workers were able to open the front side of the resort by 1:30 p.m. Friday, according to the Daily Camera.