Thousands of passengers will pass through Denver International Airport this week as the busy holiday travel season continues, and many of them will no doubt be trying to forget last week’s airport closure, endless flight delays and security screening lines that stretched from here to the North Pole.
While passengers can file the icy mess under a bad Christmas memory, city of Denver and Denver International Airport officials can’t forget the storm and the chaos it inflicted on DIA. Nor should they forget it.
Now that the plows are idling and waiting for Thursday’s expected storm, city and airport officials are busy scratching their heads, comparing notes and trying to avoid future shutdowns.
At this point, it’s all they can do.
Nearly 2 feet of snow fell on Denver in just over 24 hours, paralyzing the city and the airport. Huge storms strike the area every few years – March 2003, October 1997 – and cripple Denver’s “weather-proof” airport. It’s unavoidable.
But certainly the city and the airport can find better ways to keep runways cleared (or to clear them faster), to alert passengers in real time to possible delays, and to keep DIA from becoming, quite literally, a tent city. Two full days after the snowfall ended, DIA finally dusted off its last runway.
Kicking around DIA has been a national sport since before the airport opened, and it would be easy to do so this time around. The 45-hour closing was the longest in the airport’s 11-year history, stranding a peak of 4,700 travelers.
It has taken days to get those folks re-booked and on their way. The storm hit during the busier-than-normal holiday season, meaning there were fewer seats available for those already stranded passengers whose flights were canceled last week. The shutdown in Denver fouled up travel across the country, as more than 3,000 incoming flights were canceled or diverted during that time.
It would be easy for DIA and city officials to blame the magnitude of the storm, and its poor timing, for all of their woes, but it would be a mistake.
We’re pleased they want to learn from the storm to create a better emergency-response plan for the next inevitable blizzard.
Mayor John Hickenlooper’s idea of retrofitting snowplows onto garbage trucks, as they do in Manhattan and other cities, could be one of the positive changes from the storm.
“If there’s one bad snow storm like this every eight years, is it worth spending a million to 2 million bucks? Probably. Is it worth spending 15 million bucks? Probably not. That’s a difficult decision,” Hickenlooper said.
Spending millions to prepare for the occasional paralyzing blizzard isn’t feasible, especially with this city’s budget.
For now, though, let’s just hope Thursday’s storm packs a very light punch. Forecasters say it has potential to be a “major” storm, but it won’t rival last week’s.
We certainly hope not, since side streets throughout the Denver metro area are still thawing.
Plus, more than 9 million Americans were planning to fly during the period between Christmas and New Year’s. DIA, a major U.S. hub, could use some friendly skies this week.
