Engineering challenges mostly human

Jaws dropped around the conference table one morning last summer as Michele Denis confidently reported that the reconstructed section of Evans Avenue would be paved in time for the Saturday dedication of the Northern Nevada Training Academy.

Didn't she know, asked others in the room, that the dedication was Friday, rather than Saturday? And wasn't 10 a.m.

on Wednesday a little late to be moving up the schedule? Denis, the Regional Transportation Commission engineer who managed the Evans Avenue project, helped the team regroup.

Schedules were jiggled.

A crew from Q&D Construction, the contractor on the job, worked some extra hours.

By Thursday evening, the job was done.

That sort of problem solving won multiple awards this month for Denis and the Evans Avenue project from the Truckee Meadows Branch of the American Society of Civil Engineering.

The award-winning work involved a good dose of traditional engineering discipline with an even-larger serving of human-relations skills:

* Such as attempting to schedule the work so that dust wouldn't be kicked up onto a mural young people were painting outside the new training academy.

* Such as trying to honor the request of a restaurant owner along the street who wanted work to be moved elsewhere during the lunch hour each day so his customers could get in.

* Such as trying to figure how far back from each residential driveway to ban parking making sure to provide room for safe exits from driveways while also preserving spaces in a university neighborhood where parking is a precious commodity.

And then there were the traditional engineering challenges.

The mile-long stretch of the street to be rebuilt was constructed on lousy soil moist clay and Denis' team spent hours calculating how thick to make the roadbed and paving.

Some special challenges arose along the way.

How to protect the "Civil War" tree at the edge of the University of Nevada, Reno.How to protect two of Reno's original traffic light poles, which are at 4th Street and Evans.

(You didn't know that these historic poles were there? Neither did the RTC engineers until they were well along with their work.) None of it daunted Denis.

"It was really fun," said the five-year veteran of RTC projects.

"The best part is the interaction, the solution of the problem Nothing was impossible."

By the time residents began considering the implications that the work last summer would have on their everyday lives, the RTC engineers already had been at work on the project for about two years.

Soon after the money for the project was approved, a consulting engineer suggested that many of the utility lines in Evans might need to be replaced.

Rather than rebuild the street, only to tear it up for utility work, Denis and her team began working with utilities.

And each of those utilities, in turn, needed to go through its own internal budget process before the preliminary work could begin.

(Since then, RTC and the utilities have devised a better process.

They meet regularly and try to coordinate the utility and street projects at least a year in advance.) Next up for Denis? The challenge of managing and overseeing the construction of ramps from U.S.

395 to the Meadowood Mall area.

Already, her preliminary work won an award from the local engineering group for planning and development.

After 25 years as an engineer, Denis said she recognizes that engineers every day solve problems in a way that might win an award.

But that doesn't dampen the pride she takes in her awards.

She said, "You're really proud when it's your day."