But many of the pieces that remained stateside — nearly 2,000 of them — have gradually made their way to all 50 states to be put on display as part of solemn memorials, including several installed in Colorado. Some steel made its way across the world to serve as part of overseas memorials, to places as far-flung as New Zealand, Italy and Canada, according to a new book about the fate of the steel that came crashing down.

On Friday’s anniversary, the broken and shattered strands of steel stand as reminders of the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, the day that 19 Islamic radicals hijacked four planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Virginia and a field in Pennsylvania — the last one occurring after passengers and crew tried to rush the cockpit.

Nearly 3,000 people died as a result of the terrorists’ actions that day, though few bodies were recovered because of the extraordinarily violent impacts and the ferocious fires the commandeered planes caused.

“The agony of the steel — the twisting — is a metaphor for the people who died that day,” Max Holleran told The Denver Post this month. “Bringing this steel to all parts of the country gives communities closure — a kind of burial.”

He and his brother Sam, both of whom spent a significant chunk of their childhoods in Boulder, wrote the which tells the story of what happened to the tons of steel that once supported the nearly 10 million square feet of floor space the towers contained.

Around a dozen pieces of gnarled metal ended up in memorials in Colorado, including at fire stations in and Denver and at sites in Grand Junction, Colorado Springs, Broomfield and Pueblo.

With few burials possible following the attacks, “alternative death rites” were needed to memorialize the tragedy of that day, the Holleran brothers write in their book, with “proxy funerals and mourning rituals … performed not on bodies but on an architectural component: structural steel.”

That structural steel holds a special place in the heart of 84-year-old Don Addy. Addy served as president of the National Homeland Defense Foundation, a now-defunct Defense Department program that supported military personnel and their families.

He is responsible for bringing a half-dozen pieces of World Trade Center steel to Colorado Springs, most of which went to the military bases that give the city so much of its identity. Standing under a large, mangled I-beam memorial at Fort Carson’s Gate 1 this week, Addy thought back to the countless 9/11 ceremonies he had attended and spoken at.

“If you look at that, you can’t possibly misunderstand the power of the destruction and damage caused by these buildings’ collapse,” he said, pointing to the contorted 17-foot-long beam. “That’s the way I brought it in.”

As years have passed, the ceremonies honoring those who died on 9/11 — and in the wars that were launched in response to the attacks — have evolved, Addy said, as those alive on the day have become fewer. In fact, his search for steel pieces in New York in 2010 was prompted by a colonel at Fort Carson.

The colonel told him a memorial could help his young soldiers, who were just 10 or so years old in 2001, better understand the day’s significance.

“Why are we in these wars? Why are we doing this?” Addy said, pointing up to the twisted steel monument. “Because of that.”

Now, 16 years after the memorials were unveiled, that generational disconnection is even more pronounced, with now either too young to remember 9/11 or not yet born when it happened. That has created fertile ground for new, and often pernicious, narratives to form around that day, Addy said.

That includes comments from Colorado Democratic House candidate Melat Kiros, who is heavily favored to represent Denver in Congress starting in January. The democratic socialist, who was a young child on 9/11, was sharply criticized in recent months after saying a comment that U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, whom Kiros had challenged in the Democratic primary, said her. Kiros beat DeGette by double digits in the June 30 primary.

Addy feels comments like Kiros’ are a rewriting of history that shifts blame from the terrorists who carried out the attacks to the country that was attacked.

“I’m very worried about the rhetoric that has popped up around that day,” Addy said. “It’s propaganda.”

Highest ‘steel-to-citizen’ ratio

Colorado Springs is cited in “Scattered Steel” as the city with “one of the country’s highest steel-to-citizen ratios” when it comes to World Trade Center remnants.

Memorials can be found at Fort Carson, Peterson Space Force Base, Schriever Space Force Base, the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, the U.S. Air Force Academy and the campus of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

“In a place where so many people were lost in the War on Terror, it becomes a way of talking about their sacrifice and of rationalizing these wars that were not going very well,” Holleran said of the country’s extended conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq following 9/11.

Most of the memorials in Colorado Springs are on base, behind military checkpoints, but the ones at Fort Carson and on the CU campus are accessible to the public. The memorial at Fort Carson sits just feet from a tribute to soldiers from the base killed during the wars in the Middle East over the last quarter-century.

“In the years since 9/11, steel has become the de facto language of memorialization, and the placement of hundreds of salvaged steel beams in local memorials has spread the grief of the attacks to every U.S. state,” the Hollerans write in their book. “These scattered memorials are relics of a new kind, diffusing the national grieving process.”

The steel relic mounted on three beams at Fort Carson’s Gate 1 was brought from a hangar at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport in 2010 on a flatbed truck driven by a father-and-son team and paid for by the then-Coors Brewing Company, Addy said.

The steel had been stored at the airport, “and, for several years, (was) largely forgotten about,” the Hollerans write.

“People want to touch it,” Addy said, looking up at the beam this week. “This is where people died.”

There is no better place in the city than the CU campus to provide the tactile connection that so many seem to want when they come across a piece of 9/11 steel, Addy said. A small team of students in the school’s College of Engineering and Applied Science spent the better part of a year designing and building a large memorial for Cheyenne Mountain.

They made a smaller version, complete with a globe partially shrouding a piece of World Trade Center steel, for the CU campus. It was dedicated on Sept. 12, 2011 — one day after the 10th anniversary.

The steel inside the globe is rusted and looks rough — and that’s on purpose, said Peter Gorder, the engineering department’s chair. He oversaw the students’ work on the memorials.

“We wanted it to look like it looked when it was dropped off on our front step,” he said. “And the globe concept reflected that this was a world-changing event.”

Gorder, 63, was in his second year as a professor at CU when 9/11 happened. His son was watching SpongeBob SquarePants on the kitchen TV that Tuesday morning when his wife told him to switch the channel. He saw a plane crash into the second tower.

“It was a very meaningful event in my life,” he said of 9/11.

What Gorder remembers most about the process behind the fashioning of the memorials was the need people had to touch the steel while it sat in the department’s machine shop.

“We had people coming from all over campus to put their hands on that beam,” he said. “People just wanted to be in its presence.”

In “Scattered Steel,” Gorder said that 15 years after the memorial was put in place at the top of an outdoor staircase between two engineering buildings, hundreds of people a day walk by it — but they pay it little attention.

“Which is, I don’t know, maybe not unexpected, but kind of sad,” he told the authors.

That was the case for Jacob Biles, a 19-year-old student at the university now. He said he passed the memorial half a dozen times a week but had no idea what it represented — that is, until his parents visited him on campus and told him what it was.

“It should be something people think about,” he said this week. “It’s still affecting us to this day.”

A few minutes later, senior Clara Aziz walked past the steel-in-globe sculpture. Until that moment, the 22-year-old had no idea what it was.

“I just thought it was a metal sculpture of the globe,” she said. “I guess it doesn’t affect me as much as someone who was alive at the time (9/11 happened).”

‘Never forget’

United Airlines Captain Miles Morgan, who is managing director of flight training for the airline, said he oversees young pilots who weren’t alive when 9/11 happened.

That’s why unveiling a memorial made of 9/11 steel — Colorado’s latest — in a ceremony Friday at United’s flight training center in Denver is important to him. It comprises two steel beams, each measuring 9 feet and 11 inches, that represent the World Trade Center towers that once dominated the skyline of Lower Manhattan, he said.

Eighteen United employees died in the attacks, he said.

For Morgan, it’s personal. Over his 31 years as a United pilot, he said he flew both of the United jets that were deliberately crashed that day 25 years ago, one into a World Trade Center skyscraper and the other into the field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

“It was a horrifying thing to watch,” he said. “That’s why the monument we’re dedicating Friday is so special to us.”

Max Holleran, now 41, was a student at Boulder High School on 9/11. He watched the day unfold on a TV in the school’s library.

He hopes that at some point people can come to terms with the solemnity of the day, and honor those who died that day, while at the same time leaving space for discussions about U.S. foreign policy and religious extremism.

At Colorado’s most extensive and comprehensive 9/11 memorial in Broomfield, all was quiet at midday on a workday this week, as the collection of bronze placards mounted to stone bases told the story of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

Tucked between two pieces of flagstone, below a sculpture of a fireman resting his head on a beam — the bottom of which was buttressed by a piece of steel from ground zero — was a handwritten note written in pink magic marker. Below it sat a solitary red rose.

“Keep America free from all enemies foreign and domestic,” the note said.

And then, in all capital letters on the back: “NEVER FORGET.”

Police shot the man after he disobeyed their orders to stop reaching into a backpack, according to a statement from the Pueblo Police Department . The man was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The incident started when police were flagged down over a reported domestic disturbance on the 400 block of West Ninth Street, just before 8 p.m. Saturday. The man reportedly had a handgun and was threatening the mother of their child with it, as well as threatening to shoot anyone who approached the residence, according to police. The woman, along with their infant, had an active restraining order against the man.

The man then fled the residence while carrying the infant. He stopped at a parking lot about a block away, where he began reaching into his backpack, according to police. Police ordered the man to stop and put the infant down. The man did put the child in a nearby stroller, but continued to reach into his bag, according to the police. An officer then shot him. Police did not report finding any weapons on the man and did not release information on the contents of the bag in the Sunday afternoon news release.

The shooting is under investigation by the 10th Judicial District Critical Incident Response Team, according to Pueblo police. The name of the man will not be released until his family has been notified. The woman was not charged with any crimes. She was taken to a hospital and released with no serious injury, according to police. The infant had no reported injuries.

The “ICE Out” protest is being organized by several advocacy groups, including the and 50501 Colorado.

“Students across Colorado are standing together and walking out to demand that our communities are treated with dignity, safety, and respect,” Colorado Youth Coalition organizers wrote on Instagram. “This isn’t just one school. It¶¶Ňőap students from across the state coming together and saying ENOUGH.”

In Denver, protesters are set to gather at La Alma-Lincoln Park, 1265 Mariposa St., at noon.

Organizers on Wednesday said students at schools in Adams, Arapahoe, Alamosa, Boulder, Broomfield, Mesa, Morgan, Denver, Douglas, El Paso, Garfield, Jefferson, Larimer, Montrose, Montezuma, Pueblo, Teller and Weld counties have signed up to participate in the walkout.

Mountain Vista High School senior Braeden Kieffer, 17, said he and his classmates in Douglas County also are protesting the use of Flock cameras in the community.

“Kids know what’s going on, but we have very few ways of demonstrating about it. So one of the few things we can do is protest, to show up and show out,” Kieffer said.

The walk out is not about trying to get out of class, he said, and it feels deeply personal, especially for students who are immigrants or whose parents are immigrants.

“From nationwide to the local level, we’re seeing people’s civil rights come under attack and seeing that the adults in power don’t seem very focused on resolving those issues,” he said. “It’s in the hands of us as kids and our very limited ability to make our voices heard.”

Denver and Jefferson County school districts did not respond to requests for comment about the walkouts. Friday is a vacation day on the Aurora Public Schools calendar, and there are no classes scheduled.

Cherry Creek School District officials sent a message to middle and high school families on Thursday afternoon about the walk outs, including a statement that the district does not endorse walkouts but does support students’ First Amendment rights.

Spokesperson Randy Barber said the Boulder Valley School District is preparing for the likelihood of protests and walkouts at high schools. BVSD supports students’ right to free expression as well as those students who don’t want to participate, he said. During demonstrations, school workers focus on student safety and supervision along with minimizing disruption to normal school operations.

A similar ICE Out protest in January resulted in thousands of Colorado students and community members joining protests, and schools in Denver, Aurora, Commerce City and Glenwood Springs canceled or delayed classes because of a wave of teachers who called out of work.

Denver Public Schools previously challenged federal immigration policy when the district sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in February 2025 to keep immigration agents from arresting people in school buildings after the Trump administration rescinded a 2011 policy that prevented arrests in schools, churches and other places.

But Homeland Security later said its policy about sensitive locations had not fundamentally changed, and it published another policy on “” where immigration enforcement will generally not happen, including schools, hospitals, churches, community gathering and social service locations. DPS dropped the lawsuit in June 2025.

The sewage is expected to reach the John Martin Reservoir State Park in Bent County on Monday morning, and Colorado Parks and Wildlife advised people to avoid swimming, wading, tubing, paddleboarding and fishing in the reservoir.

The sewage spill began Wednesday at Pueblo’s wastewater treatment plant, which is just east of Interstate 25. The spill, which happened when a patch on a wastewater pipe failed, was stopped on Thursday after it was discovered. Officials estimated 4.25 million gallons of raw sewage leaked into the Arkansas River before the pipe was fixed.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment reported on Friday that dangerously high levels of bacteria, including E. coli, were detected in water samples taken from the river.

People and animals should avoid any contact with river water from where Fountain Creek enters the Arkansas River in Pueblo through John Martin Reservoir in Hasty, including Blende, Avondale, Fowler, Manzanola, Rocky Ford, La Junta and Las Animas.

Anyone who comes into contact with the river should immediately wash their hands and skin with soap and clean water; remove wet clothing and wash it separately; and contact a health care provider if they develop symptoms like diarrhea, vomiting, stomach cramps, fever or other illnesses.

The Colorado Department of Agriculture issued for contaminated irrigation water used by produce farmers downstream from Pueblo. Growers must ensure any water used on crops before, after or during a harvest is of “adequate quality,” the alert said. The Arkansas River provides water to farms and ranches between Pueblo and the state line in southeastern Colorado.

Colorado has notified the Kansas Department of Public Health and Environment so that the agency can warn its Arkansas River water users.

The sewage spill is happening at John Martin state park as the reservoir already has a bloom, according to a CPW news release. The blue-green algae is toxic and can cause skin rashes, respiratory ailments and gastrointestinal distress.

The reservoir was recently downgraded to a yellow caution level for algae-producing cyanobacteria and toxins. Regular testing continues.

Lake Hasty, a separate water body at the park, is closed to swimming, wading and other recreational activities because of the algae. That lake will not be affected by the sewage spill.

Public health officials believe the spill at the city of Pueblo’s wastewater treatment plant, which is just east of Interstate 25, started Wednesday and was discovered Thursday.

“Laboratory results for water samples collected by Pueblo County yesterday from areas impacted by the spill are expected later today,” state officials said in a news release Friday afternoon.

Pueblo and state officials are working to make sure people affected by the spill are notified, and the Department of Agriculture notified produce growers in the Arkansas River Valley “upon learning the extent of the situation from the city of Pueblo.”

This is a developing story and may be updated.

The new positions are high-paying, with average salaries ranging from $102,000 to $151,000. The incentives, mostly state tax credits, average $12,980 per job created.

Beehive Industries, a Centennial aerospace company, plans to invest $100 million in a new manufacturing facility to make engines for unmanned aircraft, including missiles. It received the largest award — $4.2 million in Job Growth Incentive Tax Credits (JGITC).

With active wars in Ukraine and Iran draining global missile stockpiles, Beehive has seen government demand for its rocket engines rise fourfold. The company expects to hire 220 employees in Arapahoe County at an average annual wage of $151,073.

About 133 of the company’s 401 employees are in Colorado, which is competing with Ohio and Tennessee for the new facility.

“We’re … manufacturing engines for the defense industry, and we have a lot of success in this development over the last several years, and we’re looking to expand to support the numerous demands that we’re seeing in the industry right now,” Heather Somervill, an executive with Beehive, told the commission.

The second largest award, worth up to $1.8 million in state tax credits, went to a Colorado startup with 20 employees that applied under the codename Project Limestone. The company develops reusable satellites, building on reusable rocket engines to lower mission costs.

Although the company wasn’t named, the most likely candidate is Lux Aeterna, an Adams County firm based in the Welby area. The company has targeted Broomfield and is also exploring Tulsa as a location for its R&D and manufacturing operations. It expects to pay an average annual wage of $124,833 with the new jobs.

Voyager Technologies, which used the codename Project Scout, received approval for $920,000 in awards from the state’s Strategic Fund, which is being matched by local tax breaks and other incentives in Arapahoe County.

Strategic Fund grants, while similarly linked to the number of jobs created, pay out in cash rather than in state tax credits, which aren’t that useful to companies reporting losses.

Voyager is an aerospace and defense company looking to expand its Centennial headquarters and create 191 jobs paying an annual average wage of $130,500. It is also considering California, Alabama and Arizona.

Matt Magaña, a Voyager executive, told commissioners that the company’s founders are based in Colorado and that Voyager is building a 150,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Pueblo, where the EDC met on Thursday.

Project Parsec, a startup with two employees, is also looking at setting up its headquarters in Arapahoe County, with plans to create 137 jobs paying an average annual wage of $102,007. The company is considering California, Alabama and Arizona as alternative homes.

A fast-growing European aerospace startup, which applied under the name Project Trench, is looking at metro Denver for its U.S. operating base and 73 jobs paying an average annual wage of $119,795. Rival states include Louisiana, Ohio and Florida. The commission awarded the company $1.37 million in Job Growth Incentive Tax Credits.

Jeff Kraft, director of business and funding and incentives at the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, told commissioners that there is a “robust pipeline” of companies looking at Colorado, which continues to consistently beat its rivals.

“We recently made the difficult decision to fully close our Pueblo manufacturing facility effective Tuesday, Oct. 13. We’re deeply grateful to our employees and are supporting them as they transition to the next step in their careers. While manufacturing operations ceased on Aug. 14, affected employees will continue to receive pay and benefits through the facility’s closure date,” said Armando Garza, Mission Foods regional director of manufacturing, in a statement.

Under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, employers enacting a large-scale layoff must provide workers with at least 60 days’ notice. Mission Foods said it will continue to pay its plant workers through October 13, even though the plant isn’t operating.

The United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, which represents most of the workers, was critical of how the closure was handled.

“On Friday, with no advance warning to workers or the union, corporate executives from Mission Foods came to Pueblo to tell approximately 100 workers that the company’s Pueblo plant would cease to operate effective immediately,” Local 7 said in a news release on Monday.

Workers, including some who had been at the plant for more than four decades, were told to pack their belongings and leave immediately, resulting in both tearful and angry farewells, according to the union.

“Mission Foods should have done better by its workers,” said Kim Cordova, president of UFCW Local 7, in the news release.

Cordova linked the closure to years of “chronic underinvestment in the Pueblo facility” and said that Local 7 would do everything in its power to provide workers with the resources they needed in the transition.

Garza said the company is encouraging all employees affected by the plant closure who would like to continue working with Mission Foods to apply for openings available on the company’s website. The company has distribution centers at 600 Gruma Drive in Pueblo and at 14800 E 35th Pl. in Aurora, and laid-off plant workers will have “bumping rights” allowing them to displace more junior employees at those locations.

“Mission Foods has been part of the Pueblo community since purchasing the manufacturing facility in 1995. We’ll continue to be a proud and supportive part of the region with our distribution centers in Pueblo and Denver,” he said.

The plant traces its origins to Candelario “Candy” and Cedelia “Sadie” Estrada, who opened a popular family restaurant in Pueblo in 1956.

So many customers requested their home-style tortillas that they opened a commercial production facility a few years later and shut down the restaurant.

Their tortillas became part of Pueblo’s culinary heritage, and the plant provided stable jobs for decades.

Mission Foods, expanding rapidly, purchased the plant in 1995, integrating it into its nationwide production network and stripping away the regional recipes and ingredients.

Mission Foods is a subsidiary of Gruma S.A. in Mexico, a conglomerate with nearly $5 billion a year in revenues controlled by billionaire Juan Antonio González Moreno and his family.

Pueblo’s economy depends heavily on manufacturing, and the region has struggled to keep pace with other areas of the state because of weakness in that sector.

In June, Pueblo had a 5.6% unemployment rate, the highest of any metro area in the state and well above the 3.9% unemployment rate statewide.

This story was updated at 4 p.m. Aug. 19 to include further comments from Mission Foods.

Nearly the entire state is in some level of drought, according to , but the aridity is especially intense over the highly populated urban corridor and the mountains that are the source of much of Colorado’s water. The winter’s record-low snowpack translated into this summer’s anemic streamflows, moisture-sucking soil and drained reservoirs. Federal authorities describe the drought frying the Front Range with sobering words: severe, extreme, exceptional.

Despite widespread severe drought, 13 of the 25 largest cities and towns in Colorado have not implemented additional mandatory water use restrictions. The 13 communities — including the cities of Fort Collins, Pueblo and Boulder — are home to more than 1.5 million people, which is about a quarter of the state’s population. Water managers in many of the communities without additional drought restrictions have asked customers to voluntarily cut back water use, to varying degrees of success.

Individual water providers set drought restrictions depending on their own portfolio of water sources and reservoirs. Communities that draw from multiple water sources, own powerful water rights and maintain large reservoir systems are best poised to ride out drought.

“Every district and provider is different; they have different water rights and storage rights, so you’re going to see vast differences from community to community,” said John Thornhill, Windsor’s director of community development.

Those differences can be confusing to customers who see headlines about extreme drought, shrinking reservoirs, other cities’ mandatory restrictions and the imperiled Colorado River system, said Kim Hutton, Boulder’s water resources manager. Denver Water and Aurora Water — along with many towns across the Western Slope — have implemented mandatory drought rules to curb water use. Pueblo, meanwhile, has in place.

Boulder is and city leaders have asked customers to voluntarily conserve water and irrigate outdoors only twice a week. Hutton doesn’t expect to implement mandatory restrictions this year based on the amount of water they have stored.

“We’ve gotten questions from community members asking, ‘Why aren’t you doing more?’” Hutton said. “It¶¶Ňőap a hard message to say, ‘Well, we planned for this and we don’t need to do more.’”

Despite the planning, water managers are keeping a close eye on reservoir storage levels, water use and streamflows. One year of extreme drought can be withstood, managers said, but multiple years will test water supply systems.

“I do think it¶¶Ňőap important for all of us to recognize that this drought is not a normal drought year,” said Pieter Van Ry, Englewood’s director of utilities. “This is unique and something that hasn’t been seen in decades, if ever, in the modern era of water supply.”

Different portfolios, different stances

Several Front Range water managers who have not imposed mandatory drought restrictions thanked previous community leaders for planning for drought and growth.

Fort Collins from the Colorado River via the Colorado Big Thompson Project, the Cache la Poudre River and the Michigan River, which is part of the North Platte River basin.

“Our predecessors planned well,” said Katie Collins, water conservation specialist with Fort Collins Utilities. “Even in this hot and dry year, our supply is enough to meet demand.”

Colorado Springs Utilities leaders have not implemented additional drought restrictions this year, though their customers are , regardless of drought status. The state’s second-largest city draws 70% of its water from the Colorado River, 25% from the Arkansas River and 5% from the South Platte River.

The utility issued a water supply watch warning customers about drought impacts, but will not implement further restrictions until it has less than 1.5 years’ worth of water in its reservoirs, water conservation supervisor Julia Gallucci said. The city currently has 2.7 years’ worth of water in storage.

“Plan for the worst, hope for best,” Gallucci said. “We’re already planning that we might have to do something far more restrictive next year.”

Many Front Range communities draw large portions of their water from across the Continental Divide. Major cities like Denver, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins draw significant portions of their supply from the Colorado River, which winds from the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park to the Utah border near Grand Junction.

The lack of watering restrictions in some Front Range communities irked Andy Mueller, general manager of the , a taxpayer-funded agency that works to protect Western Slope water. Western Slope water users are working hard to conserve, he said, and farmers are fallowing fields because there is not enough to meet all the needs.

It’s difficult to know that some of that conserved water ends up on the other side of the Continental Divide watering lawns in towns without any mandatory restrictions, he said.

“Folks on the west side of the divide know we’re in a drought, they know we have conservation efforts in place and most people are doing their best to comply with that,” Mueller said. “Frankly, we’re not seeing that in the majority of the smaller cities on the Front Range.”

Even some Front Range water providers with powerful water rights are starting to feel the strain.

For months, Englewood was the only community in the southern Denver metro without mandatory water restrictions. Although the town of approximately 35,000 does not have much water stored in reservoirs, it owns some of the most senior water rights on the South Platte River, meaning they get first dibs, even when the flow is low.

“Typically our rights are so senior that even in dry years or a normal drought year they’re able to be fulfilled,” said utilities director Van Ry.

But this is not a normal drought year, he said, and even some of their most senior water rights are being curtailed for the first time in the town’s history.

Englewood’s city council on Monday will decide whether to impose mandatory watering restrictions, at . The restrictions will limit outdoor watering to two days a week.

There’s no record of the town ever imposing mandatory drought restrictions, Van Ry said.

“That¶¶Ňőap the piece we can control – the demand side. We can’t control whether it rains or whether it snows,” Van Ry said. “The more we can do, the better we’ll be if this persists.”

Variable conservation results

The voluntary conservation metrics implemented by many communities have seen varying levels of success.

Water use is 10% below the 5-year average in Erie, which .

“We trusted that our community would respond and they did,” said Todd Fessenden, the town’s utilities director.

In Fort Collins, water use is up slightly above average, Collins said. In Boulder, use is tracking just at or below the 5-year average, Hutton said. Colorado Springs’ water use is up about 7% over the five-year average, Gallucci said.

All three water managers said they would have expected use to be much higher than average during such a long, hot and dry summer.

Denver Water, the state’s largest water provider, said at the end of July that water use across its 1.5 million customers had dropped 5% below the five-year average under its mandatory twice-a-week watering restrictions. In Aurora, from last year under similar mandatory restrictions.

Water managers across the Front Range touted years of water conservation efforts aimed at reducing use across the board, regardless of drought status. Municipal water use across the entire state is dwarfed by agricultural use, which .

While water use is up in Windsor this year over last year, Thornhill said, per capita water use in the booming town of approximately 44,000 is down 20% since 2012. Much of that increased water use occurred during the unusually warm spring, when dry and hot weather made people begin watering weeks earlier than normal.

Water use in the town of approximately 40,000 has been higher this year than in 2025 and 2023 — relatively wet years that required less watering — but lower than the dry year of 2024.

While this year’s drought is manageable, water leaders said subsequent years of dryness will cause exponentially dire problems.

“You can usually ride out the first year pretty well; it¶¶Ňőap the second and third and fourth year that become a problem,” Thornhill said.

The highway reopened as of 11:50 a.m. after officials closed the road at 10:30 a.m. when a truck caught fire. Northbound lanes were closed between Exit 97A for Central Avenue and Exit 97B for Abriendo Avenue, .

The board unanimously approved the 80-page delivery plan that details how the district, with funding from the Colorado Department of Transportation, Regional Transportation District and a potential future sales tax, could connect 12 cities along the Front Range by train and eventually grow to 10 daily trips.

Under the plan, the rail district will start running three daily trips between Denver and Fort Collins, with stops in Westminster, Broomfield, Louisville, Boulder, Longmont and Loveland in the next three years.

The district also committed to running “special event” stops near two future stadiums — the Denver Broncos stadium at Burnham Yard and Denver Summit FC stadium near Broadway and Interstate 25.

The first phase requires no new taxes and will be funded by RTD — fulfilling the 22-year-old FasTracks pledge to connect Boulder County and Denver by train — and CDOT.

Design work for the Denver-to-Fort Collins section is underway, and a vote to approve construction will come before the rail district and RTD boards by the end of the year, Front Range Passenger Rail General Manager Sal Pace said.

Approving the delivery plan is the first of several steps required for the Front Range Passenger Rail District to ask voters for a sales tax that will fund expanded service, including twice-daily trains connecting Denver, Littleton, Sterling Ranch, northern Colorado Springs, Colorado Springs and Pueblo on Union Pacific lines. The measure would also add another daily trip between Denver and Fort Collins.

The plan promises to have service to the 12 stations up and running within five years of voter approval and outlines the possibility of more frequent trips as demand increases. Service could even expand to Trinidad to link up with the long-distance line, which connects Chicago to Los Angeles, in the coming decades.

“This puts us one step closer to referring the ballot issue and one step closer to Colorado Connector rail service across the Front Range,” Pace said.

If approved by the board, the ballot measure will ask voters in communities along the rail line to approve a sales tax to fund $1.7 billion in infrastructure. The rail board is set to vote on referring the measure to the ballot at a public meeting in Pueblo next month.

The full service between Pueblo and Fort Collins would cost between $40 million and $50 million a year to operate, with officials planning on $10 million to $15 million in revenue on top of the funding from CDOT and RTD, according to the plan.

While some of the stations already exist (Denver’s Union Station) or just need “modest work” to accommodate the Colorado Connector (Boulder Junction, Littleton-Mineral), district officials said in cities along the route.

The intercity trains will be different from what metro Denver riders are used to on RTD’s light rail, featuring more room to stretch out, bathrooms and even food options. If the new trains are similar to a , each could link five to eight cars for 300 to 450 seats per train.

Officials estimate trips from Denver to Boulder will take around 45 minutes, with another hour to get to Fort Collins. Denver to Colorado Springs would also take about 1 hour and 45 minutes, and another 50 minutes to Pueblo.

Rail district officials say the train service will remove the equivalent of 29,000 cars from the road in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.