COLORADO, USA — A pothole two feet or more across led to a traffic diversion Saturday that caused an hourslong delay on the eight-mile climb from Silverthorne to the Eisenhower-Johnson Tunnel.
The snarl on Interstate 70 left lots of people with frazzled nerves, and some of them took to social media to complain about the delay.
Others, like Todd Phillips, questioned whether the Colorado Department of Transportation could have done a better job of letting drivers know there was a problem – and urging them to take a different route.
“We saw a CDOT sign that said I-70 closed – must exit at 216,” Phillips said.
There was only one problem: he saw that sign after he passed Silverthorne, the last exit for eastbound travelers on I-70.
Tamara Rollison, a CDOT spokeswoman, said in a statement that the problem started a little before 4:30 p.m. Saturday, when work crews started diverting eastbound traffic at the exit for Loveland Pass because the pothole had opened in the highway. That traffic was forced to leave the highway just east of the tunnel, then re-enter the highway east of the Loveland Ski Area.
As a result, traffic backed up in the tunnel, where CDOT uses lights to control the number of vehicles that enter to make sure none get stranded inside.
Rollison suggested that people download the COtrip app, which can warn people ahead of time about situations like the one experienced Saturday.
Rollison said CDOT signs east of Vail and near Frisco carried a message about the delay.
Those signs either weren’t on when Phillips passed, or he and lots of others missed them.
Phillips said the sign he did see after the Silverthorne exit did him no good because it was past the last place where he could have exited to avoid the jam.
“I realized we got lots of people, got lots of traffic,” Phillips said. “We can't magically fix that, but you can certainly mitigate it. And I think we do an extremely poor job of that.”
Phillips was returning home to Arvada after a day of skiing at Vail with his fiancée and another couple.
He said he and his traveling companions had no luck accessing information on their cell phones, and there was no message about the mess when someone called 511. Phillips said in all they spent about four hours inching their way toward the tunnel before finally getting to a point where he could execute a U-turn.
“By that time it was 9:40 at night. It's 28 degrees,” he said. “People are pulled off the side of the road running out of gas. I saw one guy changing his baby's diaper.”
Phillips returned to Silverthorne, gassed up, and then headed south on Colorado 9 to Fairplay, where he caught U.S. 285 toward Denver.
He said he was home within a couple of hours of getting free of the jam.
“The best you can do is be prepared,” he said. “For me, I'll probably just continue to go down 285 and won't deal with it going forward, because on a best-case scenario, you know, you're gonna hit metered traffic and then do hours getting through."
Contact 9Wants to Know investigator Kevin Vaughan with tips about this or any story: kevin.vaughan@9news.com or 303-871-1862.
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