By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
Pavement may not sound like the most exciting element of a construction project. But asphalt at two very different stadium sites highlighted the contrast of Las Vegas’ new Taj Mahal of a sports venue for the NFL Raiders off the Strip in Clark County and a parking lot that serves Cashman Field at the Cashman Center in downtown Las Vegas.
A visit to the Raiders stadium construction site Tuesday showed a healthy section of new asphalt on the stadium’s north side. The new pavement was another incremental step that gave the 62.5-acre site the feel of a developing 65,000-seat domed stadium coming to life on the west side of I-15 across from Mandalay Bay.
Meanwhile, at another much smaller stadium at the Cashman Center complex — Cashman Field, which is seven miles to the north in the city of Las Vegas — asphalt was also in the news Wednesday.
Not too far from the stadium that houses the Las Vegas Lights soccer team, the Cashman Center parking lot asphalt off Las Vegas Boulevard near the Neon Museum has been striped in a grid social-distancing pattern for people who don’t have a home. Take a look. That’s Cashman Field behind the parking lot.
The city of Las Vegas is using the upper parking lot at Cashman Center as a temporary homeless open-air “shelter” after Catholic Charities closed. A homeless man who used services at Catholic Charities and the Homeless Courtyard operated by Las Vegas had tested positive for COVID-19.
In response, the city of Las Vegas and Clark County are combining forces to build a 350-bed shelter in another section of the Cashman Center site.
Tim Burch, the county’s human services chief, said the “ISO-Q” isolation-quarantine shelter that opens April 3 will include separate areas for people who are quarantined because they were exposed to the coronavirus, an isolation area for those who test positive and have symptoms, and an isolation area for those who test positive but have no symptoms. Here’s the coronavirus crisis center shelter under construction.
Burch called the structure in the Cashman Center parking lot a “semi-permanent structure” that will provide quarantine and isolation areas for the “most vulnerable people.” Burch said the structure is not a “pop-up tent” and that it could “be here for a while.” He mentioned it could be 90 days.
At the Raiders’ $1.97 billion stadium site, coronavirus hit home there, too, when a construction worker recently tested positive for COVID-19. At the same time, OSHA required construction sites to have COVID-19 safety guidelines in plain sight of construction workers.
Signs such as these were recently installed.
LVSportsBiz.com visited about 3 p.m. when the first shift was leaving and a second shift was coming in.
Over as Cashman Field, in a neighborhood with many homeless people, it seems the parking lot “shelter” area is gaining more people looking to find a place to sleep for the night. The Cashman lot saw 66 homeless on Saturday, 117 on Sunday and 208 on Monday night, according to Jace Radke, a city spokesman. He also noted there were 480 homeless at the city’s Courtyard Saturday, 455 on Sunday and 498 on Monday.
Here’s another perspective of the Cashman parking lot that hosted the homeless and made national news.
There are more than 1,110 cases of COVID-19 in the state of Nevada. In the U.S., there are 189,035 coronavirus cases, according to Johns Hopkins University & Medicine.
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