Front Range residents woke up to a long-awaited blanketing of snow on Friday, along with the school closures, transportation woes and flight delays that often accompany Colorado’s winter storms.
Metro Denver weather spotters logged a wide range of , including almost a foot near Floyd Hill, 4 inches in Arvada, 7 inches in Lone Tree, 6 inches in Aurora and 8 inches near Denver International Airport, according to the National Weather Service.
DIA passengers faced a wave of delayed and canceled flights because of the storm, including a Nashville, Tennessee-bound United Airlines flight that was hit by a de-icing truck on Friday morning.
The crash happened at 8:26 a.m. when the truck hit a Boeing 737 carrying 122 passengers, according to DIA and airline officials.
The driver was taken to the hospital with unknown injuries and passengers deplaned via the stairs and were placed on a different flight, a United spokesperson said in an email.
Airlines at DIA reported 1,287 flight delays and 147 canceled flights on Friday, including 459 delayed and 34 canceled United flights; 402 delayed and 14 canceled Southwest flights; and 226 delayed and 92 canceled SkyWest flights.
The Federal Aviation Administration also ordered a ground delay because of the weather, which caused average delay times longer than two hours.
Drivers on the state’s major corridors also encountered transportation headaches on Friday morning when crashes closed sections of Interstate 70, northbound Interstate 25 near the Wyoming border and U.S. 285 near Fairplay.
Most metro school districts operated on normal schedules, though the snowstorm caused Jeffco Public Schools officials to cancel classes at 12 mountain schools on Friday, including Evergreen middle and high schools.
Friday’s storm brought Denver’s first measurable snowfall in nearly six weeks and followed a February that tied for the driest on record, with only trace amounts of snow recorded in Denver, National Weather Service forecasters said. The last measurable snowfall at DIA was 1.8 inches on Jan. 25.
The winter weather is not expected to last, said in a Friday evening update. Temperatures could reach 70 degrees in the metro over the weekend, with unseasonably dry and warm weather set to continue through the coming week.
