AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live from Colorado, where snow caused serious problems for the southern part of the state on Jan. 30.
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00:00Heavy snow hammered parts of eastern Colorado earlier and while the snow is
00:04winding down, just like we showed you, it made for a messy morning.
00:08Active weather meteorologist Tony Laubach has been in the thick of the snow storm and he
00:12joins us live in Colorado Springs with the latest. Tony, how are we doing out there?
00:16Well, Jeff, we are doing much, much better now compared to what we were
00:22doing just even a couple of hours ago. This was a really heavy-hitting storm
00:27for portions of the eastern Colorado, from Colorado Springs all the way out
00:31into the eastern plains. Most of Denver got away with this one. In fact, my last
00:36live hit I pretty much did right under the northern edge where it was snowing
00:41like the Dickens about five miles to the south. You went five miles north, the sun
00:45was out. So a lot of folks on the northern half of the state have no idea
00:49that this is what a good chunk of the Centennial State looks like and it
00:54really made a mess. We're going to take you out to I-70. This was one of several
00:58major wrecks that had I-70 closed in multiple areas. The interstate itself did
01:04not endure a long-distance shutdown. We see that a lot of times when you talk
01:08about a hundred, two hundred miles of the interstate closed. These were really
01:11spaced out closures due to wrecks that were just totally blocking lanes. We had
01:16this accident here. This was just outside of Lyman on the west side of Lyman. One
01:20of two jackknife semis, or actually two, within about three miles of each other
01:24that had various portions of I-70 eastbound blocked. You got up closer to
01:29Denver toward Watkins. There was another semi that had blocked both of the
01:33westbound lanes. So folks trying to get into Denver from areas like Bennett, Deer
01:38Trail had to take alternate routes to get around that accident. So that was a
01:41big issue for us as well. As we got down later into the afternoon, the storm
01:45started to wind down. The sun came out, but you wouldn't know it in some cases
01:50because we were talking ground blizzard conditions along US-24 from Lyman to
01:54Colorado Springs. There were points where you were in whiteout conditions and when
01:58the wind would lighten up a little bit, you could look above you and see blue
02:01skies. Those ground blizzards are very, very deceptive because there's not a
02:05whole lot of snow falling. It's just the wind on the backside of this system
02:08blowing the snow that fell today. Talking in terms of accumulations, this is not
02:13going to be a historic storm. It's probably not gonna be one a lot of folks
02:16remember here, but it doesn't matter because I still bring the trusty yard
02:20stick out. We're gonna find out here on the north side of Colorado Springs about
02:24what we're looking at here in this parking lot, which looks reasonably
02:27untouched. And we're sitting at about five inches of snow here on the north
02:31side of Colorado Springs between Colorado Springs and Monument. So a
02:35pretty decent bit of snow. You get out a little further east, you're probably
02:39talking drifts in the two to three feet range. So that is certainly gonna be
02:43something they're gonna be dealing with here for the rest of the day. The good
02:45news is the storm working its way on out of here. And you talked about a
02:49little birdie told me that today is thursday and we all know that. But as we
02:54get into saturday and sunday sixties,
03:00does this look like it's gonna be sixties in 48 hours? Because that's
03:03what's gonna happen. You gotta love colorado man. That is what colorado does
03:07best. Huge temperature swings during the cold season. Yep, there you go. Your
03:12neck of the woods, tony, you gotta love it, huh?
03:15All right, tony, thanks for that report. Good stuff.