By Douglas P. Marsh
dmarsh@cherryroad.com

Officials held a ribbon cutting to celebrate the completion of runway rehabilitation at the West Branch Community Airport Sept. 18. Once the project got moving it went quickly.

“Three and a half weeks,” said airport manager Ben Evergreen. “It went really, really smoothly.”

Consulting engineer Bob Leisenring said that it was not merely a resurfacing. Evergreen elaborated.

“A resurface is when you mill off two inches you and put new stuff down,” he said. “With this, we actually had four runways on top of each other because they had been resurfaced that way. We pulverized all the way down to the original substrate, the base course, and then repaved on top of that. It was a lot of history we dug up, all 55 years worth of stacked runways out there.”

Evergreen said the benefits of rehabilitation are expected to be as many as 10 years without cracks and 20 years of operation before serious repairs are needed. The process also generated substrate materials that the airport will sell to offset project costs.