JUDITH KOHLER Associated Press writer | Posted: Saturday, December 23, 2006 12:00 am
DENVER - Drivers returned to freshly plowed streets and holiday shoppers returned to newly reopened malls Friday as Denver and other Front Range cities came back to life after a paralyzing two-day snowstorm.
Passenger jets roared into sunny skies over Denver International at midday, the first flights to leave the nation's fifth-busiest airport in two days.
The storm hit Wednesday, dropping nearly 4 feet of snow in some mountain locations and up to 2 feet on Front Range cities over two days. Major highways were closed, mail was disrupted, schools and stores shut down and Denver's snowplows were nearly overwhelmed.
"We were planning to do this shopping early but then, boom, the storm came in," said Tolaurea Samuel, who was shopping with her husband Lawrence at the Town Center at Aurora mall Friday.
Like many other shopping centers around the state, Town Center hadn't been open since Wednesday afternoon. That hurt Susanne Ciddio, who hung a "Blizzard of 2006 Sale" sign on her jewelry and art kiosk at the mall Friday.
She estimated she loses about $1,500 a day when the mall is closed.
"You do what you can to make up for the loss, but once you lose it, you're not going to be able to recover," she said.
Shoppers were back in force Friday at the Citadel mall in Colorado Springs, which had opened two hours late on Thursday because of the storm, spokeswoman Linda Delany said.
"We're open and we have a pretty good crowd," , Delany said.
Mail workers in much of the eastern half of the state be on 12-hour shifts to clear out the cards, letters and packages that piled up when service was suspended during the blizzard, U.S. Postal Service spokesman Al DeSarro said.
"We literally have three days of mail," he said. "Our goal is to try to get all the packages delivered by Christmas that we have on hand."
Deliveries resumed on Friday.
Plows had cleared a path on most of Denver's thoroughfares and nearly half the residential streets by Friday, said Sue Cobb, a spokeswoman for Mayor John Hickenlooper.
Some streets lay unplowed for hours, causing grumbling among residents. But City Councilman Doug Linkhart said Denver can't realistically be equipped and staffed for a storm of that magnitude.
"I don't think ramping up for a storm that hits every three to five years is the answer," he said.
In Greeley, city crews also concentrated on the thoroughfares, upsetting some residents who thought more should have been done to clear other streets, said streets superintendent Jerry Pickett.
"I'm not going to say it's impossible, but I don't have enough bodies to do that," he said.
State Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald, a Democrat, said lawmakers may try to determine how the state can better respond to big storms.
"It seems like the response wasn't as good as it could have been," said Fitz-Gerald, who had not been able to get to her home in Coal Creek Canyon west of Denver for two days. "We have to be prepared for these kind of storms."
A few gasoline stations along the populous Interstate 25 corridor ran out of some grades of fuel during the storm because tanker trucks couldn't resupply them.
Troy Hill, vice president of Hill Petroleum, a major independent supplier, said the company was running extra deliveries this weekend, but "it's going slow," he said.
Fire officials in suburban Aurora said the weight of the snow contributed to the collapse of the roof at a strip mall Friday. No one was hurt.
Regional Transportation District buses were back on metro Denver streets, though on a limited schedule. Joggers in shorts trotted past knee-high piles of snow and others strolled without coats.
Farmers in Sedgwick County in the northeast corner of Colorado welcomed the 10 inches of snow that fell there, County Commissioner Donald Kizer said.
"We'll take 10, 20, even 30 inches of snow. We like it," he said.