Colorado transit officials have plans to install almost twice as many remotely operated avalanche blasters on mountain slopes above highways. This project is estimated to cost citizens tens of millions of dollars to prevent potentially catastrophic snow slides.
In an effort to keep roads safe and accessible for cars, travelers, and residents of growing areas, they have chosen to fire these blasters at night to cause slides.
Some of these mechanisms, which are blasted and anchored into gentle arctic at elevations up to 12,600 feet, light propane, gas, and hydrogen fuel in concussive blasts, while others slip explosives from 30-foot metal towers over slide paths.
The , Colorado Department of Transportation , has been firing 54 sabers about 200 days a year to pre-empt healthy mudslides. An updated position inventory shows bridges, including , Interstate 70, running through more than 500 deluge lines.
The somewhat detonated nights blasts add to the 400 additional blasts carried out by CDOT crews during the day by deploying teams of skiers carrying explosives in backpacks and launching 70-year-old Army cannon ordnance cannons into snow-laden mountainsides.
CDOT’s expansion to deploy 50 more , Remote Avalanche Control Systems, pending , approvals , from the U. S. Forest Service, may begin this summer along I-70 above the eastern portals of the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel, where 6.1 million vehicles roll each winter, and then shift to southern Colorado along Wolf Creek Pass south of Pagosa Springs and Coal Bank, Molas, and Red Mountain passes north of Durango.
Your team members park close to fire sites and employ smartphones or laptops to ignite explosions, according to CDOT landslide control coordinator Brian Gorsage, who uses “you see an orange flash and notice a huge boom.”
But the landslides triggered at evening, when visitors is lowest, however usually hit roads. This happened on Dec. 30 along , Berthoud Pass. Gorsage instructs pre-positioned snowplows ( CDOT runs a fleet of 876 ) to clear rock debris as quickly as possible, ideally before sunrise to reduce delays.
According to CDOT studies, Colorado’s market is impacted by I-70 being closed for deluge control, which occurred four times in 2024, by$ 1.6 million.
Controlling landslides after blizzards “is part of life along our high-altitude rock passes, roads that go off to 11, 000 feet. This is the best method ahead”, Gorsage said. Everyone should be given a very high concern, according to the statement. In order to safeguard our transit system, we are manipulating Mother Nature.
Since the early 1900s, landslides have killed 16 owners along Colorado routes, according to Colorado Avalanche Information Center files.
CDOT began an avalanche safety program after state snowplow driver Eddie Imel was killed in March 1992 by , an avalanche on U. S. 550 ( Red Mountain Pass ). Since then, no drivers have been killed in avalanches along highways.
But avalanches regularly hit vehicles:
—Last year on Jan. 24, an avalanche on the west side of Berthoud Pass ( U. S. 40 ) hit 10 vehicles and forced 72 hours of closures
Four vehicles along Colorado 91 were caught on March 7, 2019, by an avalanche that had travelled 1, 000 feet through the woods near the Copper Mountain ski area. A pickup was buried in the debris and a Subaru was toppled into 12-foot-deep debris.
An avalanche ripping down a chute on the east side of the highway crossed a creek that month, sending airborne blasts of snow that blinded drivers, partially buried two cars, and forced the closure of I-70.
In each situation, the drivers were unharmed or able to escape.
Beyond roads, avalanches increasingly hit people, mostly backcountry skiers, snowmobilers and snowshoe hikers. According to records from the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, avalanches hit 148 people in 2024, up from 53 a decade ago and 45 in 2007.
Avalanches are found naturally in the Rocky Mountains and play important roles in forest ecology. The Colorado Avalanche Information Center records about 5, 000 occurrences annually, and says that between 25, 000 and 50, 000 are produced by nature.
According to CDOT’s chief meteorologist Mike Chapman, it is getting harder to predict when and where they will hit.
” We’ve seen an increase in avalanches. We can infer there’s likely some climate change influence there”, Chapman said. A pattern that occurs over the past two years, with snow falling first in November and then several dry weeks, creates favorable conditions for avalanches.
” It’s an abnormal dry start to the winter that weakens the snowpack”, he said. ” You put snow on top of it and it slides”.
U. S. Army officials have been urging modernization of avalanche control in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, California and other western states. Ski areas already deploy computer-controlled blasters, developed in Europe, where civilian use of military weapons is prohibited. CDOT officials have set a goal of becoming “howitzer-free” on I-70 and phasing out the state’s seven howitzers by 2030.
” Especially in southwest Colorado and east of the Eisenhower Tunnel, we’re still using military artillery. We are using these weapons systems for the protection of civilians and the public. It’s been a very effective program over 50 years, but it’s not the best we can do, in this day and age, using weapons of war for this purpose”, said Ethan Greene, director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. ” Some of the systems we’re using date back to the Korean War.” We’re going to run out of pieces and parts. And the modern artillery systems are too much for what we need, just not very well suited for what we are doing.
In an effort to replace frequently large natural slides with frequent small ones, Colorado installed remote-control blasters above Berthoud Pass, a crucial link between Denver and northwestern Colorado in 2015.
After considering the effects of erosion, pollution, and damage from construction and summer maintenance of gas hoses and fittings, Forest Service officials approved the installation of 54 blasters.
CDOT officials are lining up dollars — “tens of millions in capital investments, followed by 5 % to 10 % of that each year for maintenance”, Gorsage said. A more precise price tag for the project was declined by organization officials.
The 50 additional blasters must still be approved by federal authorities.
Colorado mountain towns and , the ski industry  , have strongly supported the shift to remote-control blasting at night.
Steve Kudron, mayor of Grand Lake and a resident of Colorado since 1976, applauded this strategy as “miles ahead of what we experienced in the past” when CDOT crews frequently closed Berthoud Pass.
The 5 a. m. blasts on Dec. 30 to trigger an avalanche that hit the highway required hours of snowplow clearing, but traffic was flowing by 7: 25 a. m., Kudron said, and he ferried his in-laws to Denver International Airport in the usual 2.5 hours.
Grand Lake residents are mostly part-timers, second-home owners who rely heavily on easy road access to reach places where they can ride snowmobiles and ski cross-country, Kudron said.
Blasters bolted into the high mountain tundra “don’t quite blend in”, he said. However, we continue to support safer environments that will prevent incidents from occurring even though the pass is insufficient.
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