CenturyLink line downed by high winds west of Fort Collins prompts road closure, lengthy detour

Larimer County Road 38E along the southeastern edge of Horsetooth Reservoir was closed for more than 20 hours Wednesday and Thursday because of a downed utility line, forcing residents from hundreds of homes in the area to detour through Loveland to get to Fort Collins.

The CenturyLink utility line came down during Wednesday’s windstorm and was lying across the roadway, prompting the closure from Stout at the south end of the reservoir to Centennial Drive at Spring Canyon Dam, according to Larimer County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson David Moore.

The downed line was first reported at 4:46 p.m., prompting the road closure, Moore said. The road was reopened about 2 p.m. Thursday, according to a tweet from the Larimer County Sheriff's Office. A CenturyLink crew was still working in the area, the tweet said.

A Coloradoan photographer observed workers installing a temporary utility pole along the closed road about 11:30 a.m.

"We are aware of a traffic disruption caused by a downed telephone pole that is affecting some customers in the Fort Collins, CO area," a spokesperson for Lumen Technologies, CenturyLink's new name, wrote in an email to the Coloradoan. "Our technicians have been onsite since early this morning, and are working to clear the pole from the road safely and quickly. We expect that work will be completed very shortly, and appreciate our community’s patience and understanding."

When the downed lined was first reported, the sheriff’s office had a difficult time identifying the owner and then reaching CenturyLink for assistance, Moore said. About 10 p.m. Wednesday, it finally got in touch with people from CenturyLink. Two hours later, they were told the company wouldn’t be able to respond until Thursday morning, Moore said.

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Without additional knowledge of what utilities the line carried, Moore said the sheriff’s office was unable to do anything but close the road and wait for CenturyLink to assess the situation. Among the services CenturyLink provides in the area are landline phone and Internet connections.

“We’re kind of at their mercy,” Moore said. “It’s a big inconvenience, but we don’t want to take any chance of people being injured of folks losing their ability to call 911 or anything like that.”

The closure forced residents of neighborhoods south and west of Horsetooth Reservoir to detour 13 miles each way south through Masonville and Loveland or north through Rist or Poudre canyons to reach Fort Collins. People trying to get to Horsetooth Mountain Park from Fort Collins also had to use one of those routes to get around the closure.

Poudre School District buses had to detour through Loveland and Masonville to pick up students from those neighborhoods and bring them to schools in west Fort Collins, district spokesperson Alex Ballou said. All of those students – who attend McGraw Elementary, Webber Middle and Rocky Mountain High schools — arrived no more than 15 minutes after the start of the school day, Ballou said.

CenturyLink dispatched a crew from the Denver area to the location of the downed line about 8:30 a.m. Thursday, Moore said. That crew arrived on the scene about 10:15 a.m. and took over traffic control from the sheriff’s office.

Related: Here are the top wind speeds in Northern Colorado on Wednesday

The sheriff’s office wasn’t able to use the Everbridge emergency alert system and its reverse 911 calling system to notify residents of the road closure, Moore said.

“The Everbridge system is, by design, only allowed to be used for an imminent threat to life, obviously a wildfire, flood, that sort of thing,” he said. “As inconvenient as it is for many people, and we certainly understand that, closing the road is not a valid reason to use the emergency notification system.”

The Larimer County Sheriff’s Office posted about the road closure Thursday morning on social media, including Facebook and Twitter, he said. Those same platforms were used to announce the reopening of the road later in the day.

Coloradoan photographer Jon Austria contributed to this report.

Kelly Lyell reports on CSU, high school and other local sports and topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, follow him on Twitter @KellyLyell and find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/KellyLyell.news. If you 're a subscriber, thank you for your support. If not, please consider purchasing a digital subscription today.

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Winds down utility line near Horsetooth Reservoir; force long detour