DENVER — Denver International Airport built underground tunnels, but it's not a secret portal and it doesn't connect to the underground city that's filled with lizard people.
Instead, the newly finished 2,050-foot long, 11-foot diameter tunnel will come in handy during winter weather.
The West Gates Pond Expansion project is a major upgrade to the aircraft deicing fluid collection system. The project creates additional storage ponds for the deicing fluid, improves storm drainage, and adds new pads for planes to park while being deiced prior to takeoff.
“It doesn’t change the deicing process itself, but what it will allow us to do is to be able to collect the deicing fluid for more aircrafts as we grow and as flight numbers increase," said senior vice president for sustainability at DIA, Scott Morrissey.
The main tunnel runs beneath one of the runways and surrounding taxiways. There are also six additional tunnels of different sizes. The airport said the tunnels won't interfere with daily airport operations.
“What this project allows us to do is, as the airport continues to grow, it gives us more capacity to be able to deice and the more capacity to be able to manage that deicing fluid in the best environmental plan that we can,” Morrissey said.
According to Morrissey, without this project it would be difficult to manage the deicing fluid.
"There would be a lot of challenges because every time you deice you need find some other way to be able to manage that deicing fluid, so maybe tanks or something much less efficient than a pond system," said Morrissey.
