I-70's Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel gets massive upgrade to keep Colorado drivers flowing

When you consider all that can go wrong that would shut down Interstate 70 in the Colorado mountains, it's a wonder how things stay open and moving at all between massive snow drifts, icy conditions, car wrecks and tire chains left on the road that can lead to popped tires. Yet somehow the Colorado Department of Transportation has been working to help folks move from Clear Creek County to Summit County and back through the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel for more than 50 years at this point. Despite that success, the equipment that was inside the control room was starting to show its age, and it has now been replaced. 

"When the tunnel was built, it used copper to communicate," Bob Fifer, CDOT Deputy Director of Operations, explained Wednesday. "So a lot of the cameras and the old analog TVs, everything was done over copper. The biggest thing we did was we converted all of our cameras from copper into fiber optics."

That's not the only thing updated from the old operation center, which used to drop sometime to 45 degrees inside the room itself, forcing employees to bundle up in coats and blankets to stay warm. The new control center is located on the western end of the tunnel, making it easier for employees who mostly live on that end to get to it, as well as a huge wall of monitors that rivals the big screen at Empower Field at Mile High. All that space to watch cameras give them quicker, more accurate, and more specific information that can be easily communicated now that the tunnel is connected to networks across the state, including backups in Golden, Hanging Lake and Pueblo. It might have taken $5 million to get the new building up in running in just under two years, but the end result?

"This technology will keep the main corridor open longer and faster and we can respond quicker," Fifer said.

The stats CDOT has on the mountain corridor and the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel is startling. According to their research, every 20 seconds a crash happens on I-70 and it's not cleared, the chance of another crash happening because of the first crash goes up by 1%. Fifer explained that averages out to every 33 minutes a crash is not cleared, another crash will happen, and so on and so forth.

"We're exceeding 269,000 vehicles a day on this corridor," Fifer said. "And back in 2005, it was estimated (when there is a closure on I-70) there was a million dollar economic impact to the communities up here for every hour the interstate is closed." 

"We expect that number is probably closer to $1.6 to $2 million right now per hour."

So, aside from comfort, better cameras, and faster, more reliable connectivity, the length of time you sit stuck in traffic when there's a crash at or near the tunnel should go down, and crews can respond to a nail in the road quicker to stop a flat tire inside the tunnel. It means more time driving through the tunnel and less stopped up at the top.