Before reclamation started, removal of marine muds within the airport footprint was carried out. To provide the enormous dredging capacity and meet the time-scale imposed by the works programme, a large fleet of trailing suction hopper dredgers, cutter suction dredgers and grab and bucket dredgers was used.

Dredge levels were established from 3,000 CPTs on a square grid. Criteria for determining the base of dredging was a cone resistance (qc) of 500kPa, over 1m depth.  Below proposed seawalls the criteria was increased to 680kPa.