NDOT equipment yard in Carson City being renovated to meet EPA standards

The Nevada Department of Transportation equipment yard is getting a facelift.

As the work is ongoing, Oregon Street, an often-used shortcut between Roop and Stewart streets, has been closed or reduced to one lane.

Assistant District Engineer Rick Bosch said the yard is being reconstructed to not only improve drainage but fix a variety of issues raised by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

“It’s been a long time since the yard was constructed,” Bosch said.

As a result, there are not only significant drainage problems but a lot of clean-up and changes to meet a variety of modern EPA requirements.

“They’ve been looking at all the states across the country and it was just our turn,” he said. “Essentially, we’re bringing up everything to current EPA standards.”

And that isn’t cheap.

Bosch said the contract with Q&D Construction is for $2.9 million and is expected to take 120 work days.

When it’s done, he said, depends a lot on the weather.

“We kind of have to wait and see what the winter does to us,” Bosch said.

One reason for the expense, Bosch said, is the work needed to improve drainage in the area.

“That portion of Carson is really flat so we don’t have a lot of drainage there,” he said. “That required a lot of engineering.”

He said the Carson yard is the second such project in Nevada. A similar project was done at the Sparks yard.

Bosch said filtering systems are being installed to catch storm water and clean it before it gets into the drainage system that eventually reaches the Carson River.

The entire equipment yard will be repaved when the work will be finished next summer.

“We’re also building a wash station for our large trucks,” he said.

That wash station will catch oil and other contaminants before they get to the storm drains and will be operational this winter.

He said Q&D Construction and NDOT “are finding all kinds of stuff we didn’t know was there.”

That includes abandoned utilities and tule’s — evidence the area was once a wetlands.

One result of the project some residents — especially DMV employees — won’t like is the row of diagonal parking spaces along the yard’s Oregon Street fence line are being eliminated.