Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend brought traffic issues that local officials described to be of a “magnitude that we’ve not seen before.”

Cars looking to dodge around traffic drove on sidewalks, forcing people walking on them to jump into snow banks to avoid getting hit. Gridlocks plagued the roads, stalling essential services. A drive that usually takes an hour or so to the Front Range took some nearly eight. A usual 10-minute drive for locals to get a couple miles down the road took some residents two hours.

The chaos on Monday and Tuesday, Jan. 15-16, was a result of traffic converging in Silverthorne from more than a dozen ski resorts after blizzard conditions forced mountain passes and highways to close.

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Silverthorne Town Council rehashed the event at its Wednesday, Jan. 24, meeting and discussed what went wrong and what can be done to prevent a similar event. 

Council talked through how gridlocks on Interstate 70 caused their side of Summit County to go into a tailspin, with seemingly no remedy. Town manager Ryan Hyland told council members about how officials discussed the event afterwards — with some comparing it to “stuffing a bunch of people in a building and blocking all the exits.” 

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“This just cannot be left to this little town”

The town wondered why it was solely their responsibility to fix an event that impacted much of western Colorado. 

“This just cannot be left to this little town,” council member Tim Applegate said. 

Officials, council members, and police described a 48-hour stint during the long holiday weekend in which constituents were reaching out with concerns at a record rate. 

Since the traffic jam was most pronounced in Silverthorne, people were looking to the town to have personnel out mitigating the traffic. Yet, the town said it simply did not have the capacity to do so.

“I don’t have 50 officers to put in every corner of every intersection,” Hyland said. 

Silverthorne police chief Alice Cary said her department had around five officers on duty that night. Two officers were tied up dealing with a road closure, making them unavailable to help, and one of the five was an officer in training who was new to the job. 

On the day of the traffic jam, Silverthorne Police Department Sgt. Eric Stremel explained that since the traffic jam extended all the way from Denver and up to the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnels and beyond Exit 205, cars couldn’t get onto Interstate 70 even if officers were directing traffic. With Loveland Pass and Berthoud Pass closed due to safety issues, and other mountain passes closed due to crashes and safety issues, there weren’t many options available outside of waiting for I-70 to clear.

Council members shared narratives they heard from constituents along with some they experienced themselves, like being unable to get to work, the store, or really anywhere due to the core of town being in a standstill. 

Council discussed how lucky the town was since there weren’t any major emergencies during the traffic jam since emergency crews would have inevitably been delayed due to the gridlock. 

Hyland said the police department made a recent purchase to be able to transport residents in dire events where roads are rendered useless due to traffic. 

“We had sort of joked in the past about a snowmobile or an ATV if we really need to respond,” Hyland said. “We’re getting one because that would have been helpful on that day.”

Hyland said better internal communication is also needed in these situations. During the event, he heard hotels were open, but people on the ground were saying they were full. Additionally the schools, which house some Red Cross shelters, were closed, and that was not communicated, according to Hyland. 

Restaurants took major hits as people flooded them to find shelter. 

Council member Tanecia Spagnolia, who owns Timberline Craft Kitchen, said her restaurant was forced to turn into one of the town’s only available restrooms even though it’s a private business. 

She said since the Silverthorne Outlets closed its bathroom, people started using hers. She told the council “I had a line across the restaurant, already filled with occupancy.”

Spagnolia along with Applegate, who is also a restaurant owner, said they could not receive food or beverage deliveries at all. 

“I couldn’t get alcohol, I couldn’t get any food,” Applegate said. “For three days we didn’t have food deliveries.”

“We need to treat it like the other emergencies”

Hyland said this is an issue that the county, region, and state need to deal with collaboratively.

“It’s going to take a lot of planning and resources to think about how we can mitigate in the future,” he said. “There’s probably not a silver bullet.”

“We knew it was coming. … We need to treat it like the other emergencies so that we can pull these teams together and plan accordingly,” Hyland told council.

A countywide meeting is scheduled for Jan. 31 to debrief the event with stakeholder groups including county and town officials, law enforcement and emergency services, hospitals, schools and the Colorado Department of Transportation. 

Hyland gave a preview of what he is planning to bring up at the meeting to improve emergency management countywide for events such as these.

Hyland said he thinks stronger communication with nearby counties, such as Grand and Routt, needs to happen to get a pulse on what type of traffic could be passing through Summit. He said this could help eliminate the guessing game the county had to play and would provide insight into what it needs to gear up for. 

Mayor Ann-Marie Sanquist questioned whether the possibility of metering was on the table to gauge what type of traffic is headed through Summit, and Hyland responded that that is a conversation that is just starting to pick up among officials across the county. 

“I think the time has come for that conversation because there’s no other way for us to have a functioning town that is safe if we’re not metering,” Hyland said. 

“It’s time to have that conversation because we were paralyzed,” Hyland added. 

He said other important measures that could have been taken include putting portable restrooms along the highway, adding more signage with messaging that reflects the current traffic conditions and setting up some sort of way for people to get fuel.

Other council members recommended creating more places where people can pull off the road to create some space for traffic flow to occur. 

“People pulled through the intersections, and then they didn’t move. So no cross traffic could occur either,” Council member Kelly Baldwin said.