Located in Nevada’s former Wild West territory, the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center (TRI-center) is on the site of an old gold and silver mining camp, and is well advanced, with department store major Wal-Mart having already built a large distribution centre at the site. To help feed the businesses in the TRI, the first phase of a comprehensive road and railway network has been completed and the major thrust of the construction work has moved to the adjoining valley.The site’s co-owners, Lance Gilman and Roger Norman, have sold the first 20 million sq.m of the park. That area will be converted into 9 million sq.m of industrial buildings. This is a mere 5% of the entire park, but almost double the 5 million sq.m of industrial buildings in use in Reno and nearby Sparks. The developers, who bought the site for $20 million in 1998 from the Gulf Oil Company, are investing about $70 million in building roads and utility projects for the first phase of development. Reno-based F&P Construction, one of Nevada’s premier development contractors, is spearheading the building work at the site. “Initially we were just contracted to put the road into the park,” said company president and founder Randy Pitts, who has more than 180 construction machines in his fleet. “Now we are doing everything the park needs – the railway spurs, the highway interchange, all the interior roads, the underground utilities, the sewer and water treatment plants, building site preparation, building tilt-up construction. “Just about everything that is needed here. Every day is a new and rewarding challenge.”The TRI-center site is a challenging environment for man and machine, working on exceptionally hard rock in temperatures that soar above 38C in summer and plunge below freezing in winter. “We got both with Volvo and Arnold Machinery. I think we have seen a huge improvement in fuel efficiency and the overall productivity of the iron. “It’s as night is to day between Volvo and our previous equipment.”F&P has four Volvo EC330B, two Volvo EC460B and one Volvo EC700B crawler excavators working onsite.The company also owns several Volvo wheel loaders, a number of Volvo articulated haulers and two Volvo motor graders, and recently took delivery of two 990 motor graders.
