UPDATE: Westbound I-70 reopens after crews repair sinkhole
Colorado Department of Transportation/Courtesy photo
It was a busy Tuesday for Colorado Department of Transportation employees in Eagle County. A spring storm created early-morning closures on Vail Pass before a rapidly expanding sinkhole on the westbound shoulder of Interstate 70 near Wolcott forced an extended closure of the westbound lanes that snarled traffic for hours.
The closure was announced around 11 a.m., with traffic rerouted to U.S. Highway 6 from Edwards to Eagle. One lane of westbound Interstate 70 reopened around 4 p.m. between Wolcott and Eagle after about a five-hour closure, and the interstate was fully open just before 5 p.m.
The sinkhole is on the shoulder on the westbound side of the interstate near mile marker 147, or Eagle. The hole was spotted around 5 a.m. Tuesday morning, according to Elise Thatcher, spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Transportation. Initially, just the outside lane was closed, but crews watched the sinkhole grow, prompting the full closure.
Crews confined the sinkhole by digging around it to solid ground, bringing the full size of the hole to 20 feet by 13 feet by 8 feet deep. No water was found in the soil and the hole was dry, according to Thatcher.
For those who weren’t stuck in traffic, skiers in Vail awoke to a foot of fresh snow on Tuesday, with six days left in the resort’s 2023-24 ski season.
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The fresh snow contributes to an already above-average snowpack in Vail. Vail Mountain’s snowstake is next to a U.S. Department of Agriculture snow telemetry (SNOTEL) site, where remote measuring devices monitor snowpack through snow-water equivalent or the amount of water in the snow.
The Vail Mountain SNOTEL site showed slightly above-average snowpack with a snow-water equivalent of 19.9 inches as of last week, 102.5% of normal over the 30-year average from 1991 to 2020.
