County Commissioners awarded the bid to Parsons Drilling to drill and equip a 14-inch backup well for the Sandcreek water system, which currently serves 987 residents and is located outside the city limits, in the county just south of Casey Road and west of Pine Road. Funds for the project will also cover the cost to install 2,400 feet of 10-inch raw water transmission main and extend three-phase overhead power 900 feet.
Funding for the project comes from the Nevada Board for Financing Water Projects which provided Churchill County a $646,872 grant, and the USDA which provided a $140,528 grant along with a loan in the amount of $558,000 at 1.5% interest for 40 years.
The project is the result of work begun in 2019 by the Churchill County Planning Department to address potential growth in Churchill County. According to Marie Henson, county building official, county staff contracted with Shaw Engineering for the development of a master plan for utility services that looked at, “Where we could serve, where we could grow, and how much we water we could use.”
She said the study found that there wasn’t a good redundant water source on the Sandcreek system. “We had an emergency backup system but didn’t have the capacity to serve fire flows to meet the Nevada Revised Statutes for a redundant source, and enough to take over the main system if something were to happen.”
Shaw Engineering authored a separate study addressing that problem, looking to find the best options, and reviewed three possibilities, eventually recommending drilling a new well that could serve 500-1,000 gallons of water per minute to the system. The current, existing well provides 1,000 gallons per minute. As part of the study, said Henson, was the decision of where to locate the new well, placing it close enough that the piping costs wouldn’t be prohibitive, and it wouldn’t interfere with anyone else’s well.
Option one, the one chosen, was projected to cost $1.3 million, at which time county staff began looking at potential funding sources. In 2020 Henson approached the Nevada Board for Financing Water Projects and the United States Department of Agriculture to apply to cover the costs.
In February of this year, Shaw Engineering put out a bid for the cost of drilling the well, of approximately $350,000. One bid was received from Parsons Drilling for $341,500. The bid was ranked for compliance and responsibility and was offered for the commissioners to award last week.
The two alternative options examined by Shaw Engineering for this project were to use the two original wells at the Pine Grove Subdivision, which are still in the ground and could have been connected and rehabbed, and brought to the water system. Henson said those options proved to be more expensive than this option, “and neither well had the capacity to serve enough water for us to get fire flows. Option one was hooking up one of the wells, option two was hooking up both wells, and option three was drilling a new well.”
According to the 2019 Churchill County Water and Wastewater Utilities Master Plan, which can be found at https://bit.ly/3sXvBUk, the Churchill County water system currently consists of one pressure zone that is pressurized via the Sandcreek Booster Pump Station. The system includes a 1000 gallon per minute (GPM) well, a 750 GPM water treatment plant (WTP), one 1.048-million-gallon (MG) ground-level storage tank, one booster pump station, and various transmission and distribution piping systems ranging in size from 6 inches to 16 inches.
As the community continues to grow and housing developments are proposed throughout the county, Chris Spross, the public works director for Churchill County, says it is the financial responsibility of a developer who is planning on building a subdivision to bring the water and wastewater from the current location to and into the subdivision.
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