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Bomb Cyclone Response Analyzed

Posted at 8:32 PM, Mar 19, 2019
and last updated 2019-03-20 09:30:35-04

It was a storm of historic proportions, and took an army of city, county and state workers to try and clear roads and get people to safety. On Tuesday, El Paso County Commissioners met for the first time since the blizzard to assess the response, and examine what improvements can be made when this type of natural disaster strikes again, and it will.

Aftermath of March blizzard

Commissioners received updates from staff and spoke with a number of agency leaders about how they attacked the storm that day, and how they are still dealing with it’s aftermath in the form of clearing roads, clearing down trees and branches, repairing power lines and doing an inventory of emergency response services.

Cost to El Paso County taxpayers is still being assessed since the repair efforts continue and will continue for days if not weeks in some parts of the county. No doubt it will run in to hundreds of thousands of dollars given the amount of overtime required to keep street crews and other departments on 24/7 response.

We heard from the Office of Emergency Management who said that they are still in snow removal mode, recovery and repair of signs, particularly in the far eastern parts of the county.

County crews also ran several rescue operations and spoke of just how difficult it was to get those emergency vehicles in to remote areas where visibility was near zero and there were so many stranded motorists or abandoned cars.