DENVER — A major snowstorm has hit Colorado, closing scores of schools and government buildings and shutting down parts of highways leading to the Denver area on Thursday as meteorologists warned of difficult to near-impossible travel.
“Our city hasn’t seen a storm like this in a few years,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Wednesday.
The storm, which started Wednesday evening, was not expected to subside until Friday. The heaviest snow accumulations were expected in the Front Range Mountains and Foothills, with much area expected to get 18 to 36 inches (45 to 91 centimeters), and some amounts exceeding 4 feet (1.2 meters), according to the National Weather Service.
Parts of Interstate 70 in the Colorado mountains were closed.
“Huge flakes are coming down hard,” the weather service office in Boulder posted on social media early Thursday.
The storm started as rain in the Denver area and turned to snow. The area was expected to get 10 to 20 inches of snow, with up to 2 feet in the western suburbs, the weather service said.
Denver deployed 36 residential crews at 3 a.m. Thursday with the plan to shave the top few inches of snow from streets to clear paths to major streets.
Denver International Airport was open early Thursday, but at least several hundred flights to and from there were canceled or delayed, according to Flightaware.com.
The snowstorm comes as other parts of the country experience severe weather. Huge chunks of hail pelted parts of Kansas and Missouri Wednesday night, with storms unleashing a possible tornado in Kansas.