It isn't often you see a drainage completion party, but there was one today (Tuesday) on Dickerson Road. There are reasons to celebrate this one. Project engineer Daniel March with Q&D Construction says it was done ahead of schedule and within its budget: “And we started out with the deck stacked against us as far as the schedule. The weather did not help us."
The new pipes are now open to carry heavy rainwater from up on west 7th Street and I-80, down the hill using huge storm drain pipes. The water will be fed into the Truckee River at Dickerson Road, where Idlewild Park is right across the way. March said the pipes are "48 inches in diameter. That's about 4 feet, your full arm's width. This is a big pipe and you can crawl right through it."
It was an early August 2014 storm and flood here that originally put this new project into motion. Pictures were taken of the damage around west 4th street and Stoker Avenue, a frequently flooded intersection. John Flansberg, Director of Reno Public Works told me, “That caused that intersection to be not available for traffic to use, and obviously it’s an important corridor for traffic. It brought a lot of sediment and actually inundated a motel."
That motel is the Sunset Motel on west 4th. The owner of the Sunset tells me his parking lot was underwater then, the water streaming down the hill to his entrance on west 4th Street. At the time there was very little storm drainage. Daniel March said the water “was just overrunning people's driveways, overrunning yards. It's like there wasn't a drainage system here." Well there was, but it hardly did the job. Flansberg told me, "The storm drain that was here was built in the 50's and 60's. It was just a smaller system."
Design work for the new drainage system started right after that. Construction began 8 months ago. The final cost? $5.4 million. NDOT Engineer Charles Wolf says the Nevada Department of Transportation paid a big share, since much of the water runs off I-80 into the city's system: "So it makes sense that if the system needs to be upgraded, that we help contribute."
Teamwork, funding and action. A great accomplishment considering its size, for an area that long needed a solution. Here's to drier days, in the old west side of Reno.
