Blizzard Remedies Sought at Denver International

By Bob Berwyn, 1-29-07

Better preparation could help avoid a repeat of the costly pre-Christmas closure of Denver International Airport, the Denver Post’s transportation writer Jeffrey Leib reported in the daily’s Sunday edition. The airport closed the afternoon of Dec. 20 and stayed closed for 45 hours. More than 2,000 flights were canceled leaving 4,700 travelers stranded during a critical travel season, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars to airlines and the local economy. Using information from a preliminary report compiled by a winter operations expert, as well as from the airport’s daily operations log, Leib pieced together the story of the storm closure. High-speed multi-function snow removal equipment, along with industrial-size snow melters, more employees and better inter-departmental communication are the keys to avoiding lengthy shutdowns in case of similar blizzard conditions in the future, the Post reported. The biggest trouble spot was the critical ramp area between concourses, where the snow removal plan was only adequate for a snowfall of more than four inches. Leib’s excellent story goes into great detail on the use of industrial snow melting equipment at other airports, including Chicago’s OHare and Toronto’s Pearson International airports. The Toronto airport has 11 of the machines that can clear an entire runway in 10 to 12 minutes. They cost between $700,000 and $800,000 each, and DIA might need as many as 12 of them for each side of the airport.

Also in the Denver Post, guest columnist Roberto Moreno took a hard look at the recent creation of an urban snowboard park at Ruby Hill Park. Moreno founded Alpino, an organization committed to increasing diversity and inclusivity at U.S. mountain resorts. He casts a critical eye on the “Intrawest/Winter Park media hype” surrounding the park, charging that it diverts attention from a serious issue; namely that 90 percent of Denver kids never get to the mountains during their entire youth. According to Moreno, the Ruby Hill Park facility came at the expense of expanding an existing program at Winter Park that provided real mountain snowsports experiences for more than 1,200 youngsters last season, and the numbers could have doubled this year, save for Intrawest’s want for some Front Range PR.

As background, it’s important to understand the Winter Park is a publicly owned ski resort, leased from the U.S. Forest Service by the City of Denver Parks and Recreation Department. The city has contracted with Intrawest to run the resort and develop real estate at the base.

In providing context for his column, Moreno points out a demographic issue that some far-sighted land managers have started to grapple with recently: The ethnic shift under way in this country could fundamentally alter the public-lands constituency, potentially resulting in a generation of adults who will simply “sell those forests because they have no historical attachment to them,” Moreno wrote. Click here for his full op-ed piece.

In the same issue of the Post (Jan. 26), mountain bureau reporter Steve Lipsher describes a proposed new private-land ski resort development on Battle Mountain, near Vail and Minturn. Part of the development would be on an EPA Superfund site, and Lipsher’s article discusses how development proponents claim that the “development is the remedy for the site.”

The preliminary $3.4 million plan for Battle Mountain calls for a private ski area, a golf course and five subdivisions, ranging from luxury slopeside homes to an employee-housing complex, spread across about 5,300 acres.

Lipsher reports that developer Bobby Ginn previously developed a profitable resort at a pesticide-laced lade in Florida, describing him as “part of a pioneering wave of developers who buy contaminated lands at bargain prices and take on the cleanup in hopes of turning huge profits.”