Overnight snow in Fort Collins area could make for messy commute Tuesday morning

UPDATE: No, it's not a snow day, but Fort Collins is on accident alert due to road conditions

Another messy commute is expected Tuesday morning in Fort Collins, with forecasters calling for 1 to 3 inches of overnight snow with up to 2 more inches possible throughout the day.

Driving conditions shouldn’t be as poor as they were during the freezing rain that fell last week, but the heaviest snowfall in this storm is likely to hit Fort Collins between 3 a.m. and 8 a.m., a National Weather Service forecaster said Monday.

“That’s just in time to make the morning commute pretty slippery and snowy,” said Bernie Meier, a forecaster with the NWS Boulder office.

A winter weather advisory has been issued by the NWS for most of northeastern Colorado, including the Interstate 25 corridor from Castle Rock into southern Wyoming, from 11 p.m. Monday to 5 a.m. Tuesday.

The snow, from a storm moving south from Montana into Wyoming, is expected to start falling in the Fort Collins area between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. Tuesday, Meier said. Winds of 10 to 15 mph gusting up to 25 mph are also expected.

Snow accumulations of 3 to 5 inches are expected in Fort Collins and along the I-25 corridor from southern Wyoming to Monument, just north of Colorado Springs, Meier said.

Despite some recent staffing shortages, the city of Fort Collins plans to have all 24 of its snowplows on the roads as soon as the snow begins to fall, said Larry Schneider, the superintendent in charge of the city's streets department.

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"Right now, it looks like we should have enough drivers," Schneider said, noting that he pulls drivers from multiple city departments besides streets, including utilities, parks and recreation, forestry and traffic operations.

The timing of the snowfall, though, will make it difficult to have all major arterial roadways clear during the morning rush hour. There are no plans to pretreat the streets with anti-icing agents for this storm, Schneider said, because "we still have enough residue left on the streets from the last one."

It takes four hours for the city's snowplows to make a single pass of the city's major arterial roadways, he said, so if the snow doesn't start falling until 4 a.m., that first pass won't be completed until 8 a.m.," Schneider said.

The Colorado Department of Transportation “will have a full contingent out on the roads as needed” on I-25 and other major highways in the area, said Jared Fiel, the agency’s regional communications manager for northeastern Colorado.

His region has 196 plows available, working in two different shifts, and can call in additional resources from other regions, if necessary, he said.

“We’ll have everybody out there that needs to be out there,” Fiel said. “This one looks like it’s shaping up to be a typical winter storm for us. We’ve been very lucky this year that we haven’t had that many storms, so our folks are ready to get out there."

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: Fort Collins snow forecast: We could have a messy commute Tuesday