One small scoop from a CAT 352F excavator helped people in Nevada’s Lahontan Valley breathe one giant sigh of relief on Wednesday.

That’s because it allowed floodwaters from the Carson River to safely pass beneath U.S. Highway 50 en route to the Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge without damaging homes or businesses in the Fallon area.

The scoop was the culmination of a six-week effort to build 17 miles of canal and install culverts to divert the deluge stored upstream in the Sierra Nevada snowpack.

The hastily-completed job, which workers called Nevada’s “Big Dig” will prevent water already spilling across the desert from inundating homes and highways.

“There had to be a place for it to go,” said Fallon Mayor Ken Tedford.

Without the dig, “you would flood Fallon, the river can’t take that much,” he said.

The completion of the canal, along with other emergency diversion projects, has drastically increased the rate at which operators can safely move water through canals, reservoirs and ditches on the lower Carson River.

“We feel we are able to handle it,” Jack Worsley, deputy area manager of the Lahontan Basin Area Office of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, said of the coming Sierra snowmelt. “The numbers look pretty good.”
In addition to installing the weir and digging the canals workers installed new culverts under the highways.

The weir cost about $600,000 and the price tag for the Big Dig is an estimated at more than $3.1 million, according to Bill Lawry, a former longtime sheriff of Churchill County who was hired to oversee the emergency digging project. The Federal Emergency Management Agency could reimburse as much as 75 percent of the cost, Lawry said.

The combined projects are expected to move as much as 700,000 acre-feet of water through the area. That’s enough to cover all the land in Rhode Island with a foot of water. Now Lahontan Valley communities and operators of the lower Carson River reservoirs, dams, canals and ditches wait and watch.

There’s an estimated 400,000 acre-feet, more than 130 billion gallons, remaining in the snowpack in the Carson River Basin. Lahontan Dam is releasing water at nearly 3,000 CFS and inflows are about 4,000 CFS.

Barring a persistent hot spell or heavy rain on the snowpack operators should be able to move the water through without heavy flooding, Worsley said. But it will likely be several weeks before people in the area will know if the projects will deliver as planned.

“We have a long time to go before the snow melts on the hill,” Tedford said.

Benjamin Spillman , Reno Gazette-Journal


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