The Iowa DOT has reopened Interstate 80 from Altoona to Coralville and from West Des Moines to Council Bluffs. Interstate 35 from Ames north to the border is back open along with. other highways closed by the blizzard.
DOT winter operations director Craig Bargfrede says they closed roads because they didn’t want people trying to drive through the storm. “Visibility was the huge driving factor for all of this. We’ve been monitoring this forecast for about three or four days. And we could just see that we had a combination of light fluffy snow, winds in the 50 to 60 mile an hour range,” he says.
Bargfrede says they made the decision to preemptively close I-35. “Fortunately, that really turned out to be a very good decision for us. We understand the impacts that we have when we make that decision to travelers, but ultimately, we did not have any kind of incidents or lots of cars or trucks stuck on the side of the road that had to be pulled out, towed out or damaged,” Bargfrede says…