After spending 18 months and $3.5 million removing 550,000 cubic yards of debris from Yeager Airport's collapsed safety-overrun area, airport officials and Kanawha County commissioners announced Monday that the self-funded cleanup effort has entered its third and final phase, making it likely for slide-blocked Keystone Drive to be ready for resurfacing and reopening within three weeks, weather permitting.
"It's been a long time coming," said Terry Sayre, executive director of the Charleston airport, at a news conference held at the base of the landslide's debris field. "A lot of work has been done to get to this point - the clearing of Keystone Drive."
As Sayre spoke, loader and backhoe operators dug through the remaining debris deep enough to reach the apron of the parking lot for the Keystone Apostolic Church, which was destroyed in the March 2015 safety-zone collapse.
Other heavy-equipment operators dug, loaded and hauled away some of the four- to five-foot-deep blanket of earth that still covers Keystone Drive.
Nearby, smaller digging equipment and metal detectors were being used to locate and expose for eventual repair a Charleston Sanitary Board sewer main that was rendered inoperable by the slide, requiring the use of a temporary line and a generator-powered bypass system.
Sayre said most of the 38,000 cubic yards of debris being removed in the final phase of the slide remediation project will be hauled a few hundred yards to a disposal site on airport-owned property near Elk Two-Mile Creek, saving a time-consuming haul to the existing disposal site on a flat, cleared area on the western slope of the Charleston airport.
Rather than waiting for an insurance settlement, lawsuit verdict or assistance from state and federal sources to provide funding needed to clear away the crumbling remnants of the landslide, Yeager's governing board voted to raise the money needed to accomplish that task on its own. The airport refinanced its parking building and borrowed money, including $500,000 received from, and already repaid to, the Kanawha County Commission to get the work done. It will cost an additional $500,000 to complete the final phase of the project, which, when completed, will allow the West Virginia Division of Highways to repair and reopen Keystone Drive and restore its link to Barlow Drive.
"The airport board said it would do what's right for the people on Keystone Drive first, and deal with the litigation later," Kanawha County Commissioner Dave Hardy said. "I'm proud of our airport board. They did the right thing."
"While the insurance carriers squabbled and did not do what they were supposed to do, Yeager Airport went ahead and began removing this hazard," said County Commission President Kent Carper. "The airport also bought 20 homes from people living near here who wanted to move. We would have been very happy to have someone else help us, but it never happened."
Carper said he is committed to seeing the airport's Engineered Materials Arresting System (EMAS), destroyed in the slide, restored, but not by rebuilding the collapsed safety area and installing an EMAS bed in its original location.
Yeager's EMAS bed, he said, is credited with saving 39 lives when a regional jet aborted a takeoff attempt in January 2010, while a similar system at New York's LaGuardia International Airport brought Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence's campaign jet to a safe stop after it skidded off a runway late last month.
"We need to get our arresting system back, and we will put it back," Carper said, but not on the site of the recently collapsed system.
Carper said he favors an option under consideration by the airport's governing board to extend Yeager's runway 1,000 feet into county-owned Coonskin Park and build the new EMAS area at the Charleston end of the runway, but on existing runway surface, not a new fill structure.
Carper said new recreational facilities could be built at Coonskin to compensate for the runway's intrusion into the park.
Reach Rick Steelhammer at rsteelhammer@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5169, or follow@rsteelhammer on Twitter.