DENVER -- Hundreds of people Tuesday night jammed into a small, stuffy room at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in southeast Denver to get information on the T-REX project destined to affect their daily lives.

But when T-REX officials offered no official statements and simply referred people to the maps and charts lining the walls, some residents became enraged. Others left. Many never got out of their cars when they saw crowds lined up outside the church, 7NEWS reported.

T-REX officials, who didn't have microphones, finally climbed atop tables to address the crowd packed into in the church basement.

"It's utter chaos in there," said Bettina Schneider, who lives near University Boulevard and I-25. "It's a big waste of time. I got nothing from this. They wanted you to talk to the wall."

T-REX spokeswoman Karen Morales said that format changes will be made to Wednesday night's open house, set for 6:30 p.m. at Calvary Baptist Church. She said they didn't expect so many people to show up Tuesday night.

Judy Jehn, who lives in Denver's Platt Park neighborhood, said, "I sure hope they manage the construction better than the open house."

T-REX officials didn't reveal precisely when they'd begin working on Interstate 25, but they did announce details of the first projects in the highway's biggest trouble spot.

Major construction project information for the month of October was released, allowing commuters to begin planning how to deal with delays.

The two main ramp closures will be the Emerson off-ramp and the Washington on-ramp. Those closures will be made to accommodate construction on North Buchtel Boulevard, 7NEWS reported.

I-25 near Hampden and Quincy will be the first area to undergo highway widening.

The Yale and Hampden ramps will be closed temporarily for the widening project, but T-REX officials don't expect to close those ramps for very long at any given time.

These first projects are all located in the "narrows" area of I-25. The area is the narrowest part of the interstate, and the area that will take the longest to fix, 7NEWS reported.

"We have a requirement that once we touch the first bridge in the narrows section, we have to be in and out with all six bridges in the narrows within a 2-year period of time," T-REX project spokeswoman Karen Morales said.

The bridges are just the beginning of work in the narrows area, though. Once construction starts in the narrows, it won't likely stop until the entire project is complete, according to the T-REX schedule.

Commuters will experience delays and cone-zones along I-25 and I-225 during the construction, but project managers are required to keep three lanes of traffic open in both directions during the peak hours of 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.

"A lot of our work that will entail lane closures is going to occur at night, and we've got that really phased. Some will start at 8:30 p.m., others that will start at 11:30 p.m. and others that we will start at 1 a.m., to try and phase those in as traffic reduces into the night," Morales said.

The T-REX project is scheduled to last through the fall of 2006.

Additional Resources:

• T-REX Web Site
• T-REX Project Map