MOSES LAKE — Half a million cubic yards of dirt, rock and asphalt — that’s how much the crews with Granite Construction are moving out at Grant County International Airport as they remove the roughly 10-foot hump in the airport’s 13,503-foot main runway.

“We are almost down to the sub grade now, and we’re ready to start coming back up,” said Cynthia Van Wingerden, a project engineer for California-based Granite.

Billing itself as “America’s infrastructure company,” Granite has had around 50 of its workers and a number of its subcontractors — including local firm Neppel Electric — out at the Port of Moses Lake since January on a $20 million project mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration, which is paying for 90 percent of the project’s total cost.

The hole Granite has dug is roughly 3,500 feet long, 500 feet wide and an average of 10 feet deep.

“We’ve got quite a few people working out here,” Van Wingerden said.

According to Van Wingerden, the hump made it impossible to see one end of the runway to the other.

“It’s a safety hazard,” she said.

According to Airport Director Rich Mueller, the Air Force didn’t care about the hump because the service “didn’t have the same standards as the FAA.”

“It was fine for the Air Force, but not for civilian aviation,” he said.

“The FAA gave us a ‘modification to standard,’ but four years ago, the modifications to standard which did not have an end date — and we had two of them — the FAA said ‘we are not doing that anymore,’” Mueller said. “‘You will become standard.’”

The other “modification to standard” was the old runway lights, which were too far to either side, Mueller said. So, the runway is coming down and the runway lights are coming in closer to the runway in order to meet FAA standards.

Granite has to deliver a completed runway on June 5 — in time for 747 cargo planes to fly cherries to Asia, for the Moses Lake Air Show, and for Boeing to start testing its new 777X passenger jet.

“We have cherries to fly out,” said Port Director Don Kersey.

“We’re making that deadline,” Van Wingerden said.

Much of the 500,000 cubic yards of dirt and rock, including the old asphalt, will be reused, she explained. It will be specially engineered and compacted, with 12 inches of rock topped off by 12 inches of asphalt.

Along the way, work crews found dirt long ago contaminated with jet fuel and concrete asbestos conduits for the old runway lighting system, all of which had to be disposed of carefully.

“We are working to give the best product possible at the end of the day,” Van Wingerden said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.