With warmer weather and longer days, you'll see more of them, in their optical green and orange safety vests and hardhats, working on the other side of construction cones, barriers and fences. They are not the 3,300 employees working year-round on Fort Irwin. They are part of a changing workforce of about 5,500 contractor and subcontractor personnel who may work here for a day, to several weeks or months, now that the construction season is in full swing.
"We have several storm damage recovery projects going on right now," said Mr. Muhammad Bari, Fort Irwin's director of public works. While flood damage repair work started soon after the August 2013 flooding, the work today is mostly about permanently repairing, restoring, and in some cases also improving Fort Irwin facilities and infrastructure, paid for by $80 million Army emergency funding the past two fiscal years.
Bari noted that Fort Irwin's previous flood control plan was designed to handle 25 to 50-year storms. "What happened two years ago was a 100-year event. This doesn't mean it will happen only once every hundred years. It can happen any time. It simply means the intensity of that storm was something that hadn't been recorded in over a hundred years."
Work today includes restoring existing channels and putting in rip rap (large boulders strategically placed to break up masses of fast-flowing water in flood channels), as well as restoring concrete dikes and berms. The revised flood control plan calls for re-establishing the flood channels around Outer Loop Road and Inner Loop Road so they can better handle water rushing down from the hills behind the housing areas.
The Fort Irwin cantonment area is like a giant bowl tilting northwest to southeast, explained Bari. "Our goal is to contain water on the northeast, so it can go into established channels toward Langford Lake southeast of the cantonment area. The long-term plan is to put in retention basins along Outer Loop and Inner Loop. That will help us retain the water to recharge the water table for Fort Irwin's water wells."
Bari estimated it would probably take over a $100 million to implement the revised flood control plan. Rather than waiting in line with other Army installations to secure funding, the garrison is working with other Army, Army Reserve and National Guard units to incorporate Fort Irwin in their training plans.
One initiative is to bring West Point engineering students to work with Directorate of Public Works senior engineers during the summer, to prepare blueprints for various water surge channeling and containment projects. DPW is also working with National Training Center's operations staff to line up various National Guard and Army Reserve engineer units to train here in succession, to complete flood control projects during summer months.
Construction work resulting from the unprecedented storm two summers ago is also bulking up with Fort Irwin's two major military construction projects: the $175 million replacement hospital on Inner Loop Road past 5th Street, and the new $100 million potable water treatment plant on Goldstone, west of Outer Loop Road.
Right now, the work most apparent to the Fort Irwin community is the tearing up of roads and roadsides, where water, communication, and power lines are being built and connected to existing and new on-post utility sources. Most of this infrastructure installation work should be completed late this year or by middle of next year, Bari said.
This is in addition to Fort Irwin's annual $10-15 million capital improvements program projects to replace aging infrastructure, like sewer, water and power lines, as well as streets and facilities. As part of this work, Fort Irwin's electrical power infrastructure provider, Southern California Edison will be tying into Fort Irwin's power grid, two new home-grown major sources of power: a $6 million-solar-power project being built near Fort Irwin's RV park on Goldstone Road, and a waste to energy steam generation plant, that is part of $34 million Energy Saving Performance Contract (ESPC) project at the Fort Irwin Landfill on Sanitary Fill Road.
"It's a very challenging construction environment now," Bari said. "We have numerous contractors and they all have their own schedules to maintain."
The tyranny of distance is a major challenge for Fort Irwin. Contractors working here must bring skilled contractor personnel from Barstow, almost an hour away, one-way, or from further west, from the Victorville/Apple Valley area, about two hours away, or from over the San Bernadino mountains, three or more hours away.
DPW staff meets regularly with contractors of ongoing projects, to see if they can schedule projects on the same road at the same time. "We are working with CDM Smith on their water capital improvement projects, and with Southern California Edison, our electrical power provider, and CH2MHill, our sewage operator. If one of them has to lay down a pipe or install a conduit on the same road, we try to get them to do their projects at the same time, so we don't have multiple closures of the same road."
"Our first goal is eliminate any life and safety, risk," Bari said. "Then, we must ensure minimal impact to our training mission, and then, complete the work on time. Otherwise, we pay for contractor for the cost in delays. They have to pay their workforce, delays or not. It's a very complex situation. We have to keep all these factors in balance."
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