Charles Crane/MDN Matt Guerton, Wagner Construction Midwest manager, looks on as a tractor scraper hauls away topsoil for Phase Three of the Wetlands Hazard Mitigation Project at the Minot International Airport on Tuesday.

After nearly six years of planning and execution, the work on the Wetlands Hazard Mitigation Project at Minot International Airport is nearing completion.

Work on Phase 3 of the project kicked back into gear on Tuesday, with crews manning a variety of excavators, scrapers and heavy hauling trucks grading the final acres for the placement of drain tile on land to the northeast of the airport’s runways, to prevent the accumulation of standing water.

According to Matt Guerton, Wagner Construction Midwest manager, the project is moving along and even ahead of schedule.

“The long and the short of it is we’re trying to make sure we’re not having any standing water out here for waterfowl for nesting areas. It’s changing the entire drainage pattern of the airport so that these ducks and geese don’t wind up flying into the airways,” Guerton said. “It’s earthwork balancing. It’s cutting ditches and putting drain tile in the bottom of the ditches – widening out the landscape and flattening out the landscape so that no wildlife can hide.”

Jennifer Eckman, Minot International Airport director, said the project took about five years to design and to acquire the appropriate permits. In total, the project covered more than 50 acres of land and cost $9.3 million, with 90 percent of the funds coming from seven Federal Aviation Administration grants, $596,175 from annual North Dakota Aeronautics Commission grants and $348,734 in local share from the City of Minot.

“We’ve had to work closely with the airport operations and the maintenance group to make this all a successful dirt work project. This is a big piece of landscape and a lot of airplane activity,” Guerton said. “This is a two-year project, but we are going to be able to complete it in one. It is going to be completed in the latter part of December, but we’re really pushing forward on it.”

Guerton said the biggest challenge the project faced wasn’t the construction, but came from the amount of coordination of the work crews to navigate around the airport’s infrastructure and the lack of rain recently which made the worksite quite dusty and required the use of water trucks to keep the haze down.

“Every project has its unique ups and downs. On this particular project it’s wide open so you don’t have a lot of spectators. Other than that, it’s been a very successful project,” Guerton said.