Denver Blizzard A Holiday Snafu

A makeshift shelter of cardboard boxes sprang up near a United Airlines ticket counter at Denver International Airport as hundreds of holiday travelers stranded by a blizzard that paralyzed Colorado faced the grim prospect of remaining there until Christmas.

Denver International Airport - the nation's fifth-busiest - is expected to begin limited operations at noon Friday, almost two full days after a blizzard forced it to close its runways to all takeoffs and landings. More than 2,000 flights were canceled through Friday, according to airline officials, creating a ripple effect that disrupted air travel around the country as the holiday travel crush began to build.

Two of the airport's six runways were set to open first followed by a third runway Friday night.

The worst of the weather is gone, CBS News correspondent Kelly Cobiella reports, but Denver's travel problems are now rippling through airports from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City to Dallas. The mess of cancellations and re-routings may not be cleaned up until after Christmas.

The storm brought life to a standstill for 3.8 million people along the Front Range — a 170-mile urban corridor along the eastern edge of the Rockies that includes Denver. Police and National Guardsmen rescued hundreds of people stuck in cars.

Hundreds of miles of highway were impassable, even for the National Guard, Cobiella reports. It took eight hours, but they finally rescued a pregnant woman stranded in a van east of Denver.

For those stranded in Denver and flying standby because they were unable to rebook a flight, finding a spot on crowded planes filled with holidays travelers could prove impossible this weekend.

Frontier spokesman Joe Hodas said the airline has 65,000 bumped passengers to move systemwide and the airline is already 90 percent booked for the holidays.

"Do the math," he said.

United Airlines spokesman Jeff Kovick said it could be days.

"It's like the movie '(The) Terminal,' except it's real," Joanna Snyder, a teacher from Jackson, Wyo., said referring to the 2004 movie starring Tom Hanks as an eastern European immigrant stranded at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Snyder was camped out at a United Airlines window, hoping for a flight to Virginia.

Near the cardboard shelter, cobbled together from boxes that workers used to carry blankets to hand out to those stranded there, Snyder and others searched in vain for information.

"It's all rumor," she said.

An estimated 4,700 travelers spent Wednesday night at the airport. By Thursday evening, many had found hotel rooms while Coloradans stranded when the roads closed went home when many of the highways reopened.

Among the 1,500 to 2,000 travelers remaining at the airport and hunkering down for their second night there was Michele Bermudez. She had to change planes in Denver Wednesday while on her way from Tennessee to California and ended up at the terminal after eight hours in an airplane on the runway.

She flew on Frontier because they could best accommodate her two dogs - a beagle named Coby and a German shepherd puppy named Jake - while her family and her luggage flew on another airline.

"I finally had to buy a T-shirt and some sweat pants," she said, showing off a souvenir shirt with the brightly-colored emblem reading "Denver."

It was the biggest snowstorm to hit Colorado since a March blizzard in 2003 that shut down the region and killed six.

The storm brought life to a standstill for 3.8 million people along the Front Range - a 170-mile urban corridor along the eastern edge of the Rockies that includes Denver. Police and National Guard soldiers rescued hundreds of people stuck in cars.

Other Guard patrols took people to critical medical appointments.

Some mountain areas got more than 3 feet of snow, and up to 25 inches fell in the Denver metropolitan area.

Despite the slick roads and deep drifts, there were no immediate reports of deaths or serious injuries. In Wyoming, a woman died while walking for help after her car became stuck in the snow, officials said. In Kansas, a woman was hit by a tractor-trailer on an icy road.

Denver's normally bustling downtown began showing signs of life as the sun came out Thursday afternoon. Mail delivery across the region was suspended, and many malls were closed on what should have been one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

When Denver International was being built in the early 1990s, it was touted as an "all-weather airport" because of the spacing and alignment of its runways and electronic gear that can guide planes in for a landing on instruments. The claim was challenged at the time, and aviation analyst Michael Boyd criticized the airport's handling of the snowstorm.

"With six runways, not even one can be open within a few hours? There's something wrong at DIA," said Boyd, who's based in Evergreen. " "Minneapolis doesn't have that problem, Salt Lake doesn't have that problem. The fact is that somebody dropped the ball at DIA .... DIA is apparently now an airport to avoid in winter weather."

Spokesman Steve Snyder said plows were running during the storm, but the snow came fast and winds whipped drifts up to 5 feet high under the wings of grounded planes.

Plow managers expected to have two of the 2 mile-long, 150-foot wide runways cleared by noon Friday. Other areas that needed to be cleared late Thursday included deicing areas, taxi areas and stretches of tarmac. Ticket crews, Transportation Security Agency workers and other logistics still had to be lined up before the airport could open.

"You can't just turn an airport on with a switch," he said.

In the terminal and concourses of the airport, travelers crawled into whatever corner they could find to camp out. Some slept under banks of pay phones, or slumped in the leather chairs of a shoeshine stand, or against walls, or even in the middle of a broad, busy walkway.

Sarah Rorhbach, preparing for her second night sleeping on a sheet of cardboard spread across the airport's marble floor, smiled and hoped for the best.

"The soldiers in Iraq have it worse than us," she said. "We might have to spend Christmas here, but soldiers in Iraq will spend Christmas in the desert."

The National Weather Service reports a slight chance of snow in Denver on Friday night.