A large portion of the Yeager Airport hillside overlooking Keystone Drive slipped about 6 feet over the weekend, prompting airport officials to warn six residents to temporarily move out of the area.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Six Keystone Drive residents have been urged to relocate as a precautionary measure after large portion of the hill near one end of Yeager Airport’s runway slipped more than six feet over the weekend.
Airport executive director Rick Atkinson called an emergency meeting of the airport’s board Tuesday afternoon to update members and the public about the potential hazardous situation, which has arisen in the last few days.
Atkinson said specialists with Triad Engineering had since September been monitoring small changes in overrun area just past the southern end of the airport’s main runway. That overrun area — known formally as the Engineered Material Arresting System, or EMAS area — sits atop an engineered fill containing 1.5 million cubic yards of dirt that was built up more than eight years ago as part of the airport’s $20 million runway expansion project.
In September, officials had only noticed some minor separations forming between 4-foot cubes of light, crushable concrete that make up the overrun system. However, Atkinson said as last week’s heavy snow began to melt over the weekend, the ground in the area made an abrupt shift.
“It was a sudden and severe change of conditions,” he said.
The slip extends along a fault line that begins at the northeast corner of the hillside — the side opposite of the hillside looking down on the Elk River — and travels on about a 45 degree angle extending about 80 feet into the EMAS area.
The engineered fill area is about 270 feet tall — the tallest such fill in the world…