Looking back on a disastrous election last month, bumbling response to two winter storms now by Denver emergency management, not to mention the city a national spectacle as Denver International Airport’s unprecedented two-day closure continues to disrupt air travel across the nation this holiday weekend…
Denver has sacked mayors with prejudice for considerably less than this, as anyone who was here when Denver tried plowing the roads with garbage trucks in 1982 knows well.
We’re not saying that’s going to happen, everybody knows about John Hickenlooper’s bulletproof approval ratings, his personal charisma, etc. He stands unopposed (as of this writing) for reelection in May.
Comments?
You must be logged in to post a comment.
BY: JohnInDenver
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: 2Jung2Die
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: MichaelBowman
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: Duke Cox
IN: Who’s Paying For These Racist Anti-Harris Sign Stunts?
BY: davebarnes
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: notaskinnycook
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: 2Jung2Die
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: notaskinnycook
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
BY: Colorado Pols
IN: Who’s Paying For These Racist Anti-Harris Sign Stunts?
BY: JohnInDenver
IN: Labor Day Weekend Open Thread
Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to stay in the loop with regular updates!
Our Teflon-coated Mayor will come through this looking good.
I didn’t hear anybodyin my neighborhood mad at the Mayor–we all know that God is more in control of blizzards, not Hizzoner. If people couldn’t get out today then I’d say sure, blame him, but I got out fine. As for the election fiasco, he’s not to blame for that either.
We had over two feet of snow in Lafayette, and we were happy to be out and around today. The streets in Boulder sound much like the streets in Boulder – mostly plowed, but areas of washboard ice, I’m guessing where cars were left and the plows had to go around.
I do wonder why the airport was closed for so long, but the rest of it seems pretty par for the course for the amount of snow.
Hick was supposed to magically make all the snow disappear? Or was he supposed to use his magic teflon to make twice as many snow plows suddenly appear? It was a lot of snow and it takes time to clear it away. It was reported DIA had drifts up to 13 feet. So, what do you expect?
I didn’t live here in ’82 but New York and Chicago are able to use their garage trucks for plowing snow. The realities of the situation are documented in today’s Post here:
http://www.denverpos…
If that’s not good enough for you, go buy some snow tires and keep a shovel in your trunk just in case.
If Hickie can’t make do with what he has then he needs to learn how to be creative. In Boston for instance they hire locals with 4X4 and plows to plow the residential streets. Yeah it costs thousands of dollars, but it gets all the side streets plowed within 24-48 hours, it costs a hell of a lot less then buying city plows and in makes people responsbile for their own communites.
This is CO and Hickie should know that the chance is there that Denver will get a ton of snow and he should have been ahead of this.
Post:
Even if you’re going to poo-poo the contractors working downtown, that still means there are more city plows to do the rest of the streets.
At this point the Pompous Old Wind Bag (a/k/a Dennis Gallagher) is starting to look good. What is Don Mares doing these days? Might he be enticed to give it another go?
Denver is pleased with itself; its mayor, its boyish school superintendent, it is all about posture and image…which works until or unless the real world intervenes. On a positive note, Owens looked pretty good.
as Director of Personnel
If there is a real opponent, this is one thing they can use. And I think Hick’s teflon would develop some breaks if a strong candidate opposes him.
Doesn’t that sound like fun? Beats last minute holiday shopping in the malls……..
On here you would get all the ones that don’t have a prayer 🙂
BTW – DIA is now open as of early afternoon.
For chrissake, if there’s anyone who can make a blizzard look good, it’s Hickenlooper. I heard he was giving away free hot chocolate, too!
…..like the Mayor of Aurora, or the Reagan presidency, or Queen Elizabeth II’s reign in Britain, he’d probably be fine w/ his sleds and hot chocolate, jumping out of airplanes, his scooter on the quirky TV commercials, etc.
But Aurora has a full-time City Manager, Reagan had (more or less) competent chiefs of staff running the government, and the Queen has Tony Blair.
Who’s running the show in Denver?
So now we take the Mayor to task for being unable to control Mother Nature’s blizzard?
The incompetent bastard. I also blame him for bird flu, my bad grades in college, and the e coli in spinach.
Hickenlooper is no more “responsible” for this blizzard than Bush was “responsible” for Hurricane Katrina.
Right?
good one, govs.
You must not have much going on today. Still snowed in, I take it?
Oh, and last time I checked, it hasn’t taken Hick 9 days to get to folks. It snowed Wed. Today is Friday.
You have so much free time–you do the math.
Let us know when three thousand people are dead and huge swaths of the city are uninhabitable.
this blizzard than Bush was responsible for Hurricane Katrina”.
But for months every liberal around blamed Bush for his supposed lack of IMMEDIATELY rescueing those poor helpless people that liked to live under sea level………next to the ocean………in hurricane alley…………
Put your glorious mayor in a real city……..like Chicago.
He would piss his pants after he found out that the snow doesn’t melt ‘all by itself’ from the sun…….
Good thing he is mayor of a second rate township in the old west, and not a REAL CITY.
HA
Gecko!
its how he dealt with it.
The 45 hour closure of DIA is inexcusable. Previous storms of equal or greater strength did not see DIA closed for any thing like what is now a record closure.
I was snowed out of Denver that storm and spent 3 extra days in San Francisco (the inhumanity!) before I could get home. I worked at DIA (for frontier) and was rather glad I missed the nightmare. By the time I was able to get home, and get back to work, most of the backlog was cleared out.
DIA can weather pretty significant storms until it involves more than a foot of snow over a short period. Although we do get snow in Denver, it is not usual for us to get so much at a shot.
One of the problems that Denver has, that most other airports do not, is the sheer size of it. I’m not taling about the terminal, I’m taking the size of the area that needs to be plowed. In addition to the runways (which we have a good number of) there is also the area around the terminal and pretty long “leadways” to the runways. Compared to the other “snow area” airports of comparable volume: O’Hare, JFK, LaGuadia, DIA has more acreage to clear and it takes longer.
Was this a poor design? For snow removal purposes, maybe. But, again, they do a wonderful job of keeping up with it under “normal” winter conditions. The airport is designed to be able to handle multiple takeoffs and landings silumtaneously, and it does that very well. The down side, the same size issue that allows that, hinders us when a “storm of the decade” come along.
I would point out that DIA has only closed twice since it was built, so it can take a lot of bad weather and keep operating. But when it gets overwhelmed with snow, it really becomes a major task to dig it out.
I was in a traffic jam for an hour on Havana today, not because of an accident or stalled cars, but because half the road wasn’t plowed. I then went down to south Jeffco, where they had much more snow, and even the side streets were plowed.
I-25 south of I-225 was a complete ice washboard. Side streets off of Arapahoe were still not well-plowed. The streets up in my mountain development were better-plowed.
Who am I supposed to blame? CDOT? Douglas County?
Have to agree with the Dead Guvs, though – it’s not the blizzard, it’s how it’s handled. There is no good reason that they couldn’t re-open the airport within 24 hours.
Of course The Mayor is not responsible for the blizzard.
He is responsible for making sure that once the storm passes that services are brought back quickly.
Let us be honest. For all their faults if Pena or Webb were mayor the airport would have been opened yesterday.
They knew that the buck stopped with them and so did their underlings. This guy by passing the buck has sent a clear message that no one will be held responsible.
One thing we know for sure Webb and Pena would have been working to get the airport open not running around trying to get sleds for the little kids.
I live in Golden and all streets here were cleared this morning. 6th Avenue was perfect until you entered Denver city limits then it became a mess. And an easy half foot of snow on Broadway and Lincoln. First the election fiasco and now the terrible job of snow removal in Denver. Is there anything the Hickenlooper administration can do right?
6th avenue is a state highway. Denver has many many many more miles than the highways in the metro area. It’s the difference between a duck and a goose.
Oh, I’m sorry, how about this, “Nearly every street in Golden was clear by 10:00 this morning while major streets in Denver, such as Broadway and Lincoln, were still a total mess at noon. Is it the Mayor’s job to see that Denver’s streets are cleared in a timely manner?”
Get involved in your local HOA and get together to hire a plow if you need to get out of your house 2 hours after god decides to dump snow on this city. By the way, you live in Colorado…snow is common you Californian numb skulls…be prepared they were telling us about this storm for 3 days…global warming is going to make it a lot better soon, so don’t expect more of this (yeah right) …ps GW is more to blame than HICK because I thought it was he who had the direct line to god…oh I forgot, that’s just for social issues
Are city plows and DIA plows interchangeable? In other words, can the mayor assign 10 city plows to the airport to help clean the runways or vice versa?
Good question. By no means am I an expert but having worked at Logan International (Boston) the plows the airport uses are massive and just spew snow off to one side. They’d pretty much destroy cars along-side the streets and probably smash windows of building lining the street so I wouldnt imagine they’re interchangable.
At the same time though, I dont see why city plows couldnt be used at the airport. Not that the city had any to spare with the s#%&=ton of snow left on side streets and whatnot. 🙂
The Denver Post, this morning, provides a pretty good retort to the City of Denver’s (Hick’s) proclamation that even residential streets would be plowed by noon, Saturday.
http://www.denverpos…
As the Post piece points out, nope, it didn’t happen. At least in West Highlands it didn’t happen. Maybe Belcaro. But, not in my neighborhood. As a matter of fact, (Dan Roberts, director of Denver public works street maintenance, said just because the city sends a plow down a street doesn’t mean asphalt will show.), no one expected to see asphalt. Just a little help maybe getting the mush out of residential intersections.
Hick’s administration is so full of ignoble spin that I was not surprised to hear a DIA spokesman repeat several times that, hey, the airport ain’t closed, it’s the airlines that are shut down. Of course, the truth about our “all weather” airport finally surfaced.
But, then, Hick rose above all this snow removal nonsense and got the kids on sleds. WOO-HOO!
Go Hick!
None of the residential streets, just one block off of Broadway have been plowed yet. I have yet to see one plow (I rolled into town Friday noon) or for that matter, anyone with a snowblower.
What happened to kids shoveling? One of the reasons besides no school when it snowed was the change to make a few quarters shoveling. Dare I suggest a spoiled and wimp factor?
I’m only 23 and stopped shoveling for money just 6-7 years ago…I shoveled my walk the moment the snow stopped, I helped my new neighbor across the street, and the elderly couple down the block…my neighbors kids are in middle school, the perfect age to shovel, I’m sure they could get $20 a walk with this much snow…if they did the whole block they could buy their own playstation 3, but of course they are probably inside on the couch…I’m not without blame, I was once a lazy kid, but a loss in the family changed my attitude on that, I don’t want kids to go through what I did, but we are in general a lazy population who only loves to play the blame game and out source everything
you may suggest that. But, after shoveling our and three neighbor’s sidewalks, digging out five separate vehicles, getting stuck in two intersections in our little corner of the world (and digging ourselves out of those), and knowing all along that the absent young’uns in the neighborhood were sitting before their playstations, sending emails, talking on their “chocolate,” or otherwise engaged in non-physical exertions, it struck me: I’m probably gonna outlive the little urchins because of that silly work ethic of my generation (not to mention all the frigging exercise I do every day). So, no, don’t think we’ve got a “…spoiled and wimp factor…” goin’ on with the kids. I think, simply, the world has changed immensely in the last, oh, thirty, forty years and methinks that ain’t the kids’ fault.
will shovel the sidewalks when we die?
in my neighborhood who offered to shovel my drive. I turned her down because I derive perserve pleasure in digging out after big storms, and this was the first big one since I moved back to Colo. But someone a couple of houses down put her to work.
the little tikes who take advantage of Hick’s preschool boondoggle will be taught social responsibility, work ethic and to help (shovel sidewalks, dig out vehicles, etc.), as well as love thy neighbor. Then, when we’re gone, God will be in His heaven and all will be right with the world.
Go Hick!
…………to move that much snow, where would you put it all. This is the ROCKY MOUNTAIN Front Range, deal with it. I live out east and I watched the brown haze turn a winter wonder land into S#*t as commuters assaulted the malls, good job, humans