Quechan Casino Resort Project Beats the Odds

Quechan Casino Resort project beats the odds

By Greg Aragon

The Quechan Indian Tribe’s new $200 million Mediterranean-styled resort casino is taking shape amidst the sandy desert hills of Winterhaven, near Yuma, Ariz. and the Mexico border.

Led by San Diego-based Roel Construction Co. as general contractor, the 265,000-sq-ft project consists of a five-story, 166-room resort hotel, with swimming pool and lazy river; 33,000-sq-ft casino; 20,000-sq-ft event center; food court with a fine dining steak house and various cafes and pubs; and a surface parking lot with 1,650 spaces.

Located on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation, the design/build project broke ground in October 2007. Completion is scheduled for spring 2009.

Temecula-based Cumming Corp. is serving as construction manager.

The poured-in-place, post-tension hotel will showcase “desert Mediterranean and Tuscan” architecture, says architect Robert Dollar, vice president of Las Vegas-based Friedmutter Group Architecture, the project’s designers. He says his group will achieve the look by incorporating archways, columns and tile roofs within the exterior design.

Dollar, who is also a project executive, says the resort’s exterior color palette will use beiges, orange rust tones, amber and other earthtones to blend in with the sandy desert landscape and attract visitors from the nearby 8 Freeway.

The resort expects to draw visitors from Yuma and Imperial counties, as well as Mexico.

Brent Hughes, Roel group manager, says the project’s secluded geography posed a few interesting challenges.

“In remote locations like this, you don’t have basic things like water,” and crews weren’t able to hook up a nearby hydrant for construction water, he says. We had to throw a pump into the All American Canal and create our own retention pond and pump water several hundred feet into our retention basin for use.”

And because the project is not connected to local water, Roel had to design and build a water-treatment facility and dig two 400-ft-deep redundant wells, Hughes says. The stand-alone facility is designed to treat 150,000 gallons of fresh water per day and also 150,000 gallons of wastewater per day, he adds.

Another desert-related hurdle faced on the project involved the intense summer sun.

“Workers don’t have any protection and it’s impossible to work when it’ 120 degrees, so we worked at night during the summer,” Hughes says.

But long before the sun baked any workers on the job, it burned through the soil and created fields of clay beneath the project site.

“The clay was unexpected and was not discovered with the soils report,” Hughes adds. “We were grading and leveling the site when we discovered it underneath the footprint of the building,”

He says it added about 40 days to the project schedule to remove 100,000 yds of the material offsite and replace it with good fill sand.

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