Category: krdo-local-news

Bradley Davis

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – A physics teacher at Monument Academy High School (East Campus) is altering her curriculum this year to include a lesson plan that’s a little more “all hands on deck.”

Esme Wilhelm designed the competition for her students. She tasked teams of two and three to design a cardboard boat strong enough to carry their team members across a lap pool using the physics concepts of buoyancy, displacement and center of mass.

“Being able to see my students light up every day in this class, having their ideas and creativity, and that engineering comes into practice, is just what gives me pure joy,” Wilhelm said.

It’s the first time Esme has hosted this competition for her students. She said they have taken to it with a passion.

“I trust it. We did a lot of math about figuring out what the density and the displacement and everything was, so I’ve got confidence,” student Nalani Allen said about her group’s boat.

The race is at 1:30 p.m. in the Monument YMCA lap pool. The goal is to be the first to paddle across the length of the lap pool, but there is a Titanic award for the group that sinks the most dramatically.

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Scott Harrison

EL PASO COUNTY, Colo. (KRDO) — Some neighbors in part of Security-Widefield have finally gotten the street repaving they hoped to receive last year.

While several residents wish that the quality of the paving job had been better, they’re generally pleased that the work is over.

“Taking too long, kinda does make sense,” said Chloe Cosgrove. “It was a little frustrating when I was trying to go this way, and there’s just a big mess. And I know the weather has been part of that. But then again, it is nice to have new roads.”

Eric Hooper echoed the sentiment.

“I think they did a wonderful job,” he said. “(Took) a little longer than what I’d want. It’s definitely needed. I just wish that instead of putting a patch on like they did here at my house, they would have done it all the correct way the first time.”

Crews spent the summer and early fall doing concrete work on Bison and Chimayo drives — installing new sidewalks, curbs, gutters, and even some new driveway entrances — to prepare for repaving.

Some of that work was delayed because of rain in late spring and early summer, but dry fall weather has since allowed crews to catch up and pave farther into the season than they normally do.

In fact, crews finished the last block of paving on Tuesday and began moving equipment out early Wednesday morning.

Last summer, KRDO 13’s The Road Warrior reported on the streets surrounding Bison and Chimayo getting a slurry seal resurfacing treatment; it covers the existing pavement without milling of old pavement, as a temporary treatment before asphalt repaving.

Several neighbors contacted The Road Warrior, asking why those streets were resurfaced when they appeared to be in good condition, while Bison and Chimayo were not.

We’ve since learned that paving crews often prioritize resurfacing streets that are in less-than-poor condition because they’ll last longer, while streets like Bison and Chimayo require a complete repaving that requires more time and money.

Budget constraints often limit how much paving can be done in certain areas.

Meanwhile, neighbors along other streets in Security-Widefield eagerly await their turn for resurfacing or repaving.

Hooper understands how they feel.

“The temporary paving (crews) did was the first in the 18 years I’ve lived here,” he said.

Hooper lives where Chimayo becomes Frontier Drive, and he said that the area received a temporary resurfacing last year and is already cracking, but should get a full repaving next year.

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Rob Namnoum

The Pine Creek boys soccer team came up short in their quest to play for the Class 5A state championship. The Eagles lost in the Class 5A semifinal to Regis Jesuit 3-2 on Tuesday night.

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Rob Namnoum

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo (KRDO) — “It’s a beautiful day here in Colorado. It’s Veterans Day.  Everything gets in your soul and just makes your heart continue to swell,” says Air Force head coach Troy Calhoun.

The Air Force football team swells with pride when talking about the sacrifices that have been made by veterans, “The value of liberty. There’s nothing godly man that can replace liberty. And it only happens because we have men and women who serve, and that includes a good number of people. When you say service first responders, a little bit, but especially when you think of our veterans,” says Calhoun.

Bruin Fleischmann adds, “So I had three aunts and three uncles that went to the Naval Academy, have said that before. I had a my great uncle. He fought in Vietnam, and he was in the Marines. So, a long heritage of veterans in my family, and I think there should be more than a day, honestly, to celebrate and honor all the veterans.”

“A lot of times, you take it for granted what those people do for us. What those men and women have done for us in this country to afford the freedoms to do stuff like this,” Roger Jones Jr.

The Air Force has three games left. If they win all three, they will become bowl eligible, which could mean potatoes. “Usually, the six and six Mountain West team gets the Idaho Potato Bowl. I’m from Idaho, so like, I’m like, let’s go. We have to make this one happen,” says Fleischmann.

Jones adds, “So it’s one of those things that everyone wants to get, especially those seniors. They want to have that one more game. A guy like me, I would love to go to a ball game, play with my brothers.”

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Celeste Springer

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) — The Colorado Springs Fire Department (CSFD) confirms that a box truck rolled over in a crash on Tuesday morning.

The accident was near the intersection of Powers Boulevard and Stetson Hills Boulevard. As of 11:30 a.m., CSFD says that the westbound lanes of Stetson Hills Boulevard are closed at the intersection.

The Colorado Springs Police Department (CSPD) says that the truck hit a pickup truck stopped at a red light during the rollover. Impairment is not believed to be a factor in the crash, CSPD says.

The fire department says that one person was taken to the hospital with minor injuries. Hazmat teams are on scene for a small fuel leak.

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Celeste Springer

PUEBLO, Colo. (KRDO) — The City of Pueblo is looking ahead to a new Comprehensive Safety Action Plan, which aims to enhance road safety. It comes as a city report reveals that Pueblo has the highest per capita rate of fatal crashes, and crashes in general, in the entire state of Colorado.

Source: City of Pueblo

The proposed plan includes more than 190 infrastructure and operational improvements, totaling a cost of over $112 million.

Projects range from minor (like adding guardrails to certain streets) to major construction work (like adding a roundabout to 13th Street and Santa Fe Avenue).

The city is also considering adjusting the timing of signals across 51 locations in town.

Source: City of Pueblo

The Comprehensive Safety Action Plan also outlines a “roundabout first policy,” where future construction would aim to use roundabouts instead of traffic signals or stop signs. According to Pueblo’s Comprehensive Safety Action Plan Report, roundabouts result in an 82% decrease in fatal or injury crashes compared to a two-way stop intersection. They also resulted in a 78% decrease in fatal or injury crashes compared to using a traffic signal.

But Andrew Hayes, Pueblo’s public works director, said that the number of future roundabouts would be limited by available funding.

Additionally, there’s the question of how long it will take to complete the list of projects, and where the money to pay for them will come from.

“There’s no fixed timeline associated with the recommendations in the plan,” Hayes explained. “What the plan does for us is it opens the door to federal funding opportunities and to state funding opportunities for safety grants. So, every year, we’ve been actually pretty successful in applying for and being awarded Highway Safety Improvement Program grants from CDOT.”

He mentioned that this is the first in-depth study of its kind for Pueblo, with Pueblo County and the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) participating as partners.

“Some of the intersections and corridors are in the city, some are in the county, and some are on highways in CDOT’s jurisdiction,” he said. “We also used real-time traffic data gathered from 15 intersections over a 24-hour period.”

A consultant conducted the $800,000 study, with the city paying a fourth and the rest covered by a federally-funded CDOT grant.

However, the plan met with mixed reactions at Monday night’s City Council meeting before narrowly passing by a 4-3 vote.

Councilwoman Regina Maestri was among the three members opposed.

“We usually do work sessions on comprehensive plans,” she explained. “We didn’t give it that opportunity. The people didn’t get the right opportunity to understand it. I’m told that it will be posted publicly, so people can see it that way. I’m not sure why it wasn’t presented in a work session first. That was their decision.”

Maestri said that the Council will be closely watching how funds for the plan are spent, because individual expenditures will require Council approval.

To read the full report, click here.

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Rob Namnoum

Top prep performances for the week of November 3rd.

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Bradley Davis

MONUMENT, Colo. (KRDO) – The state’s third giant troll will soon make its home in Palmer Lake. It joins the two in Victor and Breckenridge.

It’s the first created by a Colorado artist, and the first made of metal.

“The first time I heated metal up and hit it, it was like I had been dating all these different techniques, and they were okay, but then I fell in love,” troll artist Jodie Bliss said.

The troll will sit on a beam of the Palmer Lake Pedestrian Bridge. The project is an initiative by the Awake the Lake organization.

Bliss’ metalwork studio is in Monument, less than a 10-minute drive from Palmer Lake.

“I’ve invited multiple members of the community to come out and leave their mark on the trail,” Bliss said.

Danish artist Thomas Dambo created the other two giant sculptures, primarily using wood. Bliss said she’s partial to blacksmithing.

“If you come onto an idea where you don’t have the right tool for it, well, you make it! And I think that’s what make Blacksmiths the king of the craftsmen; the queen of all the craftsmen,” Bliss said. “If we’ve got any woodworkers who are insulted by that, come at me!”

Bliss said she would love to be the resident “troll” artist for other cities across Colorado.

“If anyone else wants a troll, I’m your girl,” Bliss said. “I think [the other artists] would agree that there’s nothing wrong with a little healthy competition.”

Being local has afforded Bliss some unique opportunities with the design.

“You know who this old man is modeled after? It’s this girl!” Bliss said.

Bliss said she was having trouble visualizing how she wanted the troll to pose, so she sat on the bridge.

“I sat there, and I took pictures of myself pretending I was holding a lantern,” Bliss said.

Bliss led blacksmithing classes for the community members who created their own pieces to add to the troll. She also taught KRDO13’s Bradley Davis the basics of working a forge.

“I never would admit that I like teaching, but I seem to be planning it more into my life routine!” Bliss said.

Bliss said the goal is to have the troll completed and sitting on the bridge by the end of December, but said it could be a little later, depending on how the final processes go. On Monday, she gave KRDO13 a blacksmithing demo and a look at her progress.

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Scott Harrison

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) — Officials are temporarily closing two street segments on Monday because of projects to either rebuild or demolish existing bridges.

One closure will happen on Costilla Street, just east of Wahsatch Avenue, on the edge of downtown; that’s where crews will begin tearing down a 70-year-old railroad bridge.

The second closure will occur on Las Vegas Street, south of the Janitell Road intersection, under an ongoing bridge replacement project on Circle Drive.

Officials said that the Costilla closure will last through the end of January, while the Las Vegas closure will continue through next week with the possibility of weekend work.

Ryan Phipps, the city’s capital improvements manager, said that the train bridge has been inactive for several decades and is one of a handful of city bridges listed in poor condition.

“The city’s streetcar system, when Prospect Lake became a popular recreational location, there was actually a streetcar that ran along Costilla and underneath this bridge in the early 1900s,” he explained. “It was ultimately removed about the time that this bridge was constructed in the mid-1950s.”

Courtesy: Pikes Peak Library District, 1967.

Phipps said that trains, and then automobiles, traveled across the bridge, and that it was part of an extensive railroad network along the east side of downtown.

“The Catalyst Campus building (at the junction of Colorado and Pikes Peak Avenues) was a train station for it,” he said.

At the turn of this century, however, the rail lines closed, and the bridge became a location for homeless camps, illegal campfires, trash dumping, and vandalism.

“We’re demolishing the bridge for safety reasons,” Phipps said. “You have to pull it apart. This isn’t a wrecking ball-type of situation. It does require a little bit of a more strategic approach to be able to remove that fill, and then start pulling apart the pieces, basically in the opposite manner of how you would have put it together in the first place.”

He added that much of the original rail lines south of the bridge remain in place, surrounded by a security fence that trespassers have cut into several times.

“South of the bridge remains railroad property,” Phipps explained. “It’s a very slow transition. It’s a process that’s decades in the making.”

Costilla Street, east of the bridge, was the site of the annual Pikes Peak Soap Box Derby until it moved to a new location in Monument this summer.

Courtesy: Pikes Peak Library District, 1961.

Officials ask drivers to use Pikes Peak Avenue to the north and Fountain Boulevard to the south as detours around the closure.

Several businesses along Costilla east of the closure, and access to the Shooks Run Trail, remain open.

Meanwhile, officials are closing the Las Vegas Street segment so that crews can build a concrete barrier for a new bridge pier.

That segment has closed several times because of the construction of four new bridges on Circle, to replace older bridges rated in poor condition.

The city plans to hold an event later this week to announce that traffic will open on both bridges, ending a project that took two years and cost around $45 million.

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Marina Garcia

COLORADO SPRINGS, (Colo.) KRDO – The government shutdown is grounding flights in major airports just before the holidays, following mandates from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Flight Aware’s misery map shows red across the nation, including at the Denver International Airport, where over 80 flights were canceled and over 450 were delayed.

And the misery is spreading to some travelers through the Colorado Springs airport who still depend on larger airports like Denver to get around.

This is usually a time when people plan to visit family for the holiday, but Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says, as we get closer to Thanksgiving, there will be even less air travel.

This comes as a result of the Trump Administration helping to ease the workload of air traffic controllers brought on by staffing shortages.

We spoke to a woman who’s a frequent flier due to her job, and all the uncertainty got her thinking about other options to make sure she made it home.

“I thought about, well, man, if I can’t make it home, it was like a 22-hour drive, I believe, from Oregon back to Colorado. So I thought about driving that,” says Bernadette Florez-Madrid, a traveler.

Bernadette says she did make it to Denver from Oregon; however, United Airlines sent a text saying her flight was canceled to Colorado Springs, forcing her to take a costly taxi back home.

“Having to taxi between Denver to Colorado Springs just to get back to my vehicle. That was like, that was a pretty hefty charge. So that wasn’t the greatest,” says Bernadette Florez-Madrid, a traveler.

Air traffic controllers are also feeling the pinch and will miss their second full paycheck next week.

Now, with the potential reopening of the government, this may impact the trajectory of flight cancellations.

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