COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — With every snowstorm that hits Colorado Springs, crews at the airport are working around the clock to keep the airfield clear.
The Colorado Springs Airport snow team is made up of 31 employees from both Airfield Maintenance and Facility Maintenance. The teams are led by two "snow bosses." For this week's storm, crews started prepping at 2 p.m. on Monday, hours before the snow started to fall.
"It's not just when it's actually starting to snow, but they put together a presentation that I received this morning that has all of the weather, what kind of the characters, the characteristics of what the storm will actually be, goes into a lot of the prep," Aidan Ryan the Marketing and Communications Manager for the Colorado Springs Airport said Monday afternoon. "Is it going to be more of a wet snow, more of an ice storm? What the temperatures will be like? All of those come into play when preparing for that actual snow event."
The teams are divided into two groups, the "red team" and "blue team." They work 12-hour shifts rotating from 2 a.m. to 2 p.m., according to Ryan. Each team consists of 12 airfield drivers, two landslide drivers, and a mechanic. The work continues until the storm passes and all cleanup is completed.
"We even have certain equipment, if it's just raining out there, to snow, to ice, the type of snow that it is," Ryan added. "So the type of blowers we need, or is it just plows? Is it just making sure that the runway is clear? Or is there a solution that actually needs to go on to the airfield in order to de-ice those accumulations? So there's quite a lot of prep between the characteristics to the type of equipment, to the number of people that we have in order to remain a safe, open and operational."
The equipment the airport has includes 13 airfield plow trucks, three blowers, a liquid de-icer truck and a solid de-icer truck. The de-icing truck is ready to go before the storm even starts.
If you need to check your flight status at the Colorado Springs Airport, you can do so by clicking here.
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