Work on track for an early finish

And now some good news from the Clark County Water Reclamation District: Construction is wrapping up sooner than expected on its new 13-mile, $160 million sewer project that has choked traffic through the south central valley for almost two years.

District spokeswoman Kim Adler said the Paradise-Whitney Interceptor could begin carrying wastewater as soon as the end of this month, and the entire project is on track for completion by the first quarter

of 2017, roughly nine months earlier than scheduled.

“We’ve made some really good progress,” Adler said. “We’re very close to releasing flows into the main line.”

Work began in late 2014 on the new main sewer line, which runs in a jagged line from from Valley View Boulevard and Serene Avenue in the southwest valley to Nellis Boulevard and Flamingo Road in the east. The pipeline, some of it 6 feet in diameter, crosses beneath Interstate 15, the 215 Beltway and U.S. Highway 95 and is expected to provide more than enough sewer capacity to the southwest valley to serve all future development in the area.

Officials have called it the largest pipeline project in the district’s history, but it hasn’t been easy.

The job was divided into sections and contracted to three different construction firms to speed the work along. Instead, contractors found themselves swamped as they tried to dig and lay pipe 40 feet underground in places saturated by the shallow groundwater table.

As recently as December, the construction schedule called for two of the three sections to be completed by January 2017 and for the entire project to be done by December 2017.

Barring some unforeseen problem, Adler said, the job should be finished a lot sooner than that.