The bids are in on flood armor for the yard that keeps the 7 train running. MTA Construction & Development opened bids November 3, 2023 on contract C40002, Flood Resilience at Corona Yard in Queens. Thirteen contractors put in numbers. RMSK Contracting Corp. was the apparent low at $8,170,150 for reinforcing walls, swapping in flood doors, and setting up deployable storm barriers across the yard's most critical buildings.

The top of the tab was a knife fight. FOS Development Corp. sat second at $8,249,920 — about 1 percent off the low, which means two estimating rooms read this job almost exactly the same way. SH5 Construction came in at $8,992,781, Zaman Construction at $9,286,509, and Lo Sardo General Contractors and Seabreeze General Construction landed nearly on top of each other at $9,479,355 and $9,482,340. The heavyweights showed too: Navillus at $10,360,125, Tully Construction at $10,911,125. Citnalta Construction topped the sheet at $16,141,150 — nearly twice the low. Thirteen bidders on a job the MTA advertised at $5 million to $10 million tells you the GC market wanted this work, and the low bid landed inside the agency's own range.

What RMSK signed up for, per the MTA's solicitation: reinforce walls up to the Design Flood Elevation — the height engineers expect floodwater to reach in a design storm — replace existing doors with flood doors, and relocate louvers and install air conditioning units above that flood line at the Signal Relay Building and Signal Tower. At the Car Washer Building and the Signal Tower, the contractor installs deployable barriers — flood panels the yard crew sets up when a storm is coming. It bid as an A+B contract, meaning schedule was scored alongside price, with a 730-day term. The job is 100 percent federally funded through the FTA and carries a 22.5 percent DBE goal.

Corona Yard, with its gate at 126th Street and Roosevelt Avenue, is the Flushing Line's support base — the maintenance shop, car washer, signal tower and signal relay building that keep the 7 on the rails. The MTA calls the Flushing Line a vital artery for Queens and one of the most heavily traveled routes in the system; more than 50,000 riders transfer at Flushing every weekday between the 7 line and 20 bus routes, and the line strings together Woodside, Jackson Heights, Corona and Flushing on its way to Manhattan. Flood the signal relay building and you have not just soaked a shed — you have knocked out the brains of the line. This contract is part of the MTA's Superstorm Sandy mitigation program, the same family of work that flood-proofed Coney Island Yard.

The standard caveat applies: an apparent low bid is not an award. At opening, the numbers go under review — the agency checks responsiveness, paperwork, and on an A+B job, the schedule side of the bid before anything is signed.

This one went the distance. The MTA's Infrastructure unit counted Corona Yard resiliency among roughly $867 million in projects it awarded in 2023, and the agency's October 2025 Climate Resilience Roadmap update reported the coastal surge protections at Corona Yard nearly complete — "on time and on budget," per the MTA — with hardening and equipment relocation at the signal relay building, signal tower, car wash facility, circuit breaker house and maintenance shop.

MTA's own contract-documents holders list puts the number of firms that pulled plans and specs at 47 — and that count was taken three weeks before bid day, so the real total was at least that big by the time bids were due. Thirteen turned in a number. That's a roughly 72 percent walk-away rate between plan pickup and bid opening — on the high side even for public work — and a sign the flood-hardening scope and the A+B schedule pressure thinned the field more than the trade alone would explain. For a GC weighing whether to chase the next flood-resiliency package the MTA puts out, that's the real read: plenty of firms will look at this kind of work, fewer are willing to price it.