It took a monumental act of nature to keep The Denver Post from rolling off the presses, and it is believed to have happened only once in 125 years — Christmas Day of 1982, when in nearly two feet of snow.
Neither The Post nor the Rocky Mountain News published that day.
The official snowfall figure was 23.8 inches from a storm that began on Dec. 24 and continued through the holiday, though some areas reported accumulations several inches higher. The snow was whipped by gusting winds that covered Denver in drifts and made roads impassable.
Neil Westergaard, who then was a reporter at the paper, answered the call that Christmas Eve day to cover the developing story. He and a photographer headed out to track down a tip that a family was huddled beneath an overpass in the city’s Globeville neighborhood.
“It was pretty rough going,” recalls Westergaard, who years later would serve as the paper’s editor. “We got stuck several times and had to dig out … never found the family.”
Eventually, a colleague in a Toyota Land Cruiser came to pick them up and head back to the paper’s offices at 15th and California streets. On the way there, they encountered an RTD bus that had gotten stuck in the snow and wound up interviewing the passengers and snapping photos for the next day’s edition.
But when they arrived at the office, they and the rest of the staff learned that the decision had been made not to publish because circulation trucks couldn’t get the papers delivered. The news did not sit well.
“We’d all been out freezing our (butts) off all day getting stories,” he says. “There were a lot of hard feelings that day. It was unthinkable to many of us that we just wouldn’t publish an edition.”
Travelers were stranded, businesses shuttered and services like police and hospitals leaned on citizens with four-wheel-drive vehicles to help them navigate the treacherous conditions. Denver was virtually paralyzed for days afterward, and several deaths were reported as a result of exposure and heart attacks while the city tried to dig out.
In fact, Denver’s snow removal process proved so inept that Mayor Bill McNichols eventually lost re-election to Federico Peña after the campaign focused in part on the city’s failure to clear the streets. At one point, the city dispatched garbage trucks to tamp down the snow on side streets so vehicles could pass.
The Post resumed publishing the next day, but it would be days more before vehicles could safely resume home delivery to all subscribers.
