Poudre Fire Hazmat Team Shuts Down Transfort Center

It's one of those headlines that makes you go, "wait, what?" But in reality? How big of a deal was this?

Around 10:45 AM on Aug 22 in Fort Collins, the Poudre Fire Authority was called to a scene at the Downtown Transit Center for Transfort at North College and Jefferson in response to a CO2 spill, evacuating the building.

Buses remained running as the Poudre Fire Hazmat Team cleaned up a spill, the result of a CO2 delivery truck apparently losing some of its contents near the facility. The parking lot and surrounding area had to be closed off as the crew cleared large, frozen chunks of essentially dry ice from the area, breaking it into smaller pieces and letting it evaporate.

If you've ever gotten a food delivery or an ice cream cake, odds are you've conducting your own at home experiments with dry ice a time or two. Imagine way more of that than you've ever had in one place at one time, then you can imagine what they were dealing with.

No matter how hot it's been outside, dry ice doesn't melt the same way as regular ice, rather transforming into a gaseous state that looks like fog, rather than water like when a normal ice cube melts. Hence the term "dry ice."

Except dry ice - which is literally frozen CO2 - is way colder than regular ice, and can be quite hazardous if touched or breathed in as it literally suffocates you.

Poudre Fire managed to clean up the spill and after tests of the air in the area, ultimately declared the area safe to return to normal operations.