Colorado’s Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel—the highest public trafficked tunnel in the country—is adding a new fire truck to its operations to keep motorists safe.
While there has never been a fatality inside of the tunnel, there is an average of one fire a week. At its high elevation, this requires the tunnel to have its own small fire reserve.
The cause of the fires is typically a fluid leak that hits the exhaust. And five times in the last seven years a vehicle has burned inside the tunnel itself, according to Paul Fox, the Colorado Department of Transportation’s (CDOT) tunnel program manager for its Denver metro region.
“The stakes are very high,” said Fox to CPR.org. “We could damage the tunnels and then we're going to have to close and that would put an impact on our economy.”
CDOT officials estimate that the state’s economy takes a nearly $2 million hit every hour the I-70 mountain corridor is closed. The interstate’s two large tunnels — the Eisenhower Johnson under the Continental Divide, and the Hanging Lake tunnel in Glenwood Canyon — are particularly vulnerable spots.
A high-volume sprinkler system is Eisenhower tunnel’s first line of fire defense. But now CDOT has replaced that tunnel’s 36-year-old fire truck with a new larger, more powerful rig that will be able to respond to fires faster, for longer and more accurately.
“We don't get to see new trucks that often, so it's nice to see one in my career up here,” said Fox.
CDOT’s old truck required firefighters to manually set water pressure using mechanical handles, while the new one has LEDs and push buttons that are much easier to use when every second counts.
“It makes it a simple operation because when there's a fire going on, you get stressed, your adrenaline is going, you don't think clearly,” Fox said.
The Hanging Lake tunnel will also get a new truck. That tunnel doesn’t have a sprinkler system but has never seen a car fire inside its walls, said Shilo Holbrook, a CDOT maintenance worker. Still, he said, CDOT crews routinely respond to vehicle fires and wildfires in Glenwood Canyon using a truck dating back to the early 1990s.
Source: CPR.org, Denver Gazette
