Fixing Poorly Formatted Data

I receive a spreadsheet from the project managment company that we are working for. The spreadsheet shows the completion dates for each phase of each project.

The problem that I have is that whoever designed the spreadsheet did it by using merged cells to group the projects by start date. In order for me to use this data effectively I would prefer to have one additional column showing the start date.

Look at the attachment and you will see their dark green merged cells. Each group of projects are separated by two large merged cells. The top merged cell says "Week 1, Week 2, etc." The second merged cell says "Groud Break Date: October 12th, 2008, etc."

I know how to quickly unmerge these cells. I should be able to fairly easily reformat "Ground Break Date: October 12th, 2008" to an actual date that Excel will recognize.

What I would like to do is figure out a way to easily add that 10/12/08 or 10/19/08, etc. date to a new column for each project without having to manually enter it each time.