Highways reopened early Friday in Kansas after a wintery storm dumped up to a half foot of snow on the western part of the state.

The storm also caused one fatal accident, stranded hundreds of holiday travelers and felled a 300-foot broadcast tower.

As the storm moved east and weakened Thursday, Interstate 70 began reopening in sections, starting at Salina and moving west. The road was open to the Colorado line by around 1 a.m. Friday. Closed stretches of U.S. 36, U.S. 40 and Kansas 27 near the Colorado border reopened around 10 a.m. Friday.

But the Kansas Department of Transportation urged motorists to use extra caution while crews finished clearing snow-packed roads, said agency spokeswoman Kim Stich.

“We’re certainly still working on them,” Stich said. “Our guys will continue 24 hours a day until things are back to where they want them.”

Crews contended with snowfall totals that varied from 7 inches in Goodland, to 6 inches in Hoxie, to 4 inches in Wallace, to 3 inches in Russell Springs to 1 inch in Hill City, Brad Mickelson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Goodland.

To the east of Hill City, there were reports of rain and freezing rain, Mickelson said.

The weather conditions contributed to numerous crashes, including the fatal accident Thursday on U.S. 50 in Finney County.

A sport-utility vehicle and a van spun out on an icy patch of road. When the van came to rest on the shoulder, a woman whose car had been in the ditch walked up to check on the passengers. An eastbound tractor-trailer then slid into the vehicle, killing the woman, later identified as Monett M. Lapointe, 30, of Garden City.

The freezing rain was blamed for damaging trees and felling a 300-foot broadcast tower early Thursday south of Norton.

“The rungs were the size of a Coke bottle,” said Ron Ellis, director of operations for Lenora-based Rural Telephone Service Company Inc. “The tower is rated for an inch of ice and 100 mile per hour winds, but it ended up getting a lot more ice than an inch, so it definitely exceeded its limits.”

The tower transmitted signals that allowed the hospital to talk to the police department and the ambulance service. It also transmitted KQNK-FM radio and Christian Broadcast Network programming to listeners in a radius of about 50 miles.

Ellis said crews set up a temporary 100-foot tower Thursday night, which allowed the hospital and the police and ambulance to communicate.

But Ellis said it would be next week before KQNK-FM and the Christian Broadcast Network can resume broadcasting.

By Friday, the only remnants of the system in Kansas were overcast, low clouds in the eastern part of the state. He said partly cloudy to mostly sunny skies with near-normal temperatures were forecast through the weekend across much of the state.

“Most areas that received snow during the storm are looking at a white Christmas,” Mickelson said.