Runway Closure Scheduled to Implement FAA Mandate

Evansville – Evansville Regional Airport (EVV) announced plans to temporarily close the main runway during the spring/summer of 2014 to complete the final phase of their multi-year, federally mandated Runway Safety Area (RSA) construction project.  Flights will continue by using the North/South runway while construction is occurring.

The project, required by federal statute to be completed by the end of 2015, will shift Runway 4-22 approximately 2400’ to the northeast.  This shift will be done to meet FAA runway safety standards by eliminating the current intersection with runway 18-36 and moving it further away from Hwy 41 and St. George Rd.

Construction is scheduled to begin on Wednesday March 5, 2014 and is planned to last through September 2014. This will be over a year ahead of the federally mandated deadline of December 31, 2015. CHA Consulting is serving as engineer for the project and WB Koester Construction, LLC is serving as the prime contractor for this portion of the project. Construction will be conducted 20 hours per day, six days a week (Mon.- Sat.) to help minimize the impact to passengers and airlines. Multiple phases of preparatory work have already been completed to support this large project. Those phases include: relocation of Hwy 57, closing a portion of Oak Hill Rd & rerouting it to Kansas Rd., improvements to the Kansas Rd./Hwy 57 intersection by increasing it to 6 lanes from 2, adding two roundabouts in the area, relocating a railroad track, relocation of numerous utilities, reconfiguring taxiways, transfering over 1.1 million cubic yards of dirt to the runway site.  In an effort to be as green as possible, the concrete being taken up is to be crushed on-site and recycled as fill for the new construction.

“EVV and the airlines have been working together along with the FAA for the past several years to develop a workable plan to offer the same great service and capacity that we currently have as we work through this necessary construction project,” said Director of Marketing & Air Service Development Dianna Page. “We want to minimize the impact to our passengers as much as possible during construction.” During construction, the Airport will operate exclusively on its North South Runway (18-36) for both commercial & general aviation traffic.  Flight patterns will change as a result.  Improvements were made to this runway in preparation for the project including GPS instrument approaches and taxiway improvements.

The main runway (4-22) should be open for departures and visual approaches as early as August 1, 2014.  Instrument approaches to this runway should be certified by mid September 2014.

This project will be completed ahead of the scheduled deadline due to the great collaboration of all the stakeholders involved, including the airport, airlines, FAA, local residents & passengers, business community as well as our local, state and federal elected officials. The total cost of this project is estimated to be $67 million of which 90% is federally funded and the remaining 10% from state and local funds.

“We are glad that we are entering the final phase of this project and completing this important safety mandate more than a year ahead of schedule,” said Executive Director of the airport Doug Joest.  “Futhermore, we have leveraged almost $62 million in federal and state funds into many construction jobs that not only made needed improvements to the airport but also to the roads and other infrastructure around the airport.”

For more information and project updates, visit www.flyevv.com  or visit us on facebook or twitter @Flyevv

University of Evansville Associate Professor of English Mark Cirino has been named a contributing editor to the Hemingway Letters Project. The project, headquartered at The Pennsylvania State University under General Editor Sandra Spanier, is producing a comprehensive scholarly edition of some 6,000 letters written by Ernest Hemingway. Approximately 85 percent of these letters have never before been published.

Cambridge University Press is publishing the series in a projected seventeen volumes. Volume 1 was published in 2011 and Volume 2 in 2013. Cambridge University Press expects Volume 3 to be published in 2015. Pulitzer Prize winning historian A. Scott Berg has referred to these volumes as “a literary treasure trove.”

Cirino will assist in the production of forthcoming volumes and will assume a leading role in writing and editing the volume covering 1948-1951. It will span the writing and publication of Hemingway’s novel set in Venice, Across the River and into the Trees.

The Hemingway Letters has been designated a We, the People project, “a special recognition by the NEH for model projects that advance the study, teaching, and understanding of American history and culture.” It is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Cirino is co-program director of the 16th biennial Hemingway conference, to be held in Venice in June. He serves as general editor for Kent State University Press’s ‘Reading Hemingway’ series. Two forthcoming books in the series, Reading Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees and Imagining Spain: 21st-Century Essays on Hemingway and the Spanish World (co-edited with Mark P. Ott) will be published in 2015.

Cirino, who received his Ph.D. at the Graduate Center-CUNY, is co-editor of Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory (Kent State UP 2010) and author of Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action (U of Wisconsin Press 2012). He is also the author of two novels, Name the Baby (Anchor 1998) and Arizona Blues (Rogner & Bernhard 2000). Cirino’s fiction has been published in Drunken Boat, and his scholarly work has been published in The Hemingway Review, The Mailer Review, Papers on Language and Literature, Voices in Italian Americana, and PMLA.

He teaches American literature at UE, and hosts ‘Important Words,’ a radio talk show devoted to literature, on the University’s radio station, WUEV 91.5 FM.

For the latest updates on the Hemingway Letters Project, visit: https://www.facebook.com/HemingwayLetters

Follow the Hemingway Letters Project on Twitter at: @HemingwayLetter