Rockway Precast recently teamed up with ARB Incorporated to help provide power to the City Center.

The City Center is the most expensive privately funded construction project in U.S. history. Being so large, back up power was needed to feed this city within a city. Instead of putting up large overhead power lines that flood the streets and block views of the amazing piece of architecture the City Center along with Nevada Energy decided the power would be taken underground. ARB Inc. was hired to take down the old power lines on Tropicana and Frank Sinatra loop and tasked to come up with a transmission vault design that could house power lines and equipment underground.

ARB contacted Rockway Precast with a design idea; because of Rockway’s experience with large underground vaults it was a perfect fit. The design was given to us at Rockway, taking our knowledge the vault was re-engineered and approved by Nevada Energy to be used as a Transmission Vault that would provide the added power the City Center needed and keep the streets aesthetically pleasing to the public view.

The challenges for Rockway were too design a vault that would be strong enough to hold 15,000 pounds of tension from the heavy cables being run through them.  Make sure it was traffic rated so that vehicles could drive over them with an H-20 loading. Rockway had to cast fiberglass rebar inserts to keep the holes from electrocuting contractors. All this wasn’t a problem considering Rockway’s reputation of building durable long lasting vaults. 

Rockway’s vault met all the design criteria and was able to stay within the budget that was set for the job. 8 double circuit vaults that were 10’x24’x8’ ID that weighed 118,000 pounds, were pre-casted at Rockway’s plant and shipped to the job site for ARB Inc. ARB was extremely pleased with the Rockway and has contacted us for another project with two different sizes of vaults to take down power lines in front of Caesar’s Palace.