osm2pgql - 7 days on "Building index on table: planet_osm_ways"

Re-posted from stackoverflow:

I'm importing the whole-planet OSM data set into PostgreSQL 9.6.2 on a Amazon EC2 i3.4xlarge (122 Gb mem, 16 CPUs) with the PostgreSQL data directory on a throughput-optimized 2TB volume. I have adjusted Postgres parameters like this (for the import):

shared_buffers = 4GB
work_mem = 100MB
fsync = off 
synchronous_commit = off
max_wal_size = 4GB
checkpoint_completion_target = 0.9

I'm using osm2pgsql to execute the import. Here's the command:

osm2pgsql -c -d gis --number-processes 12 --slim -C 64000 --flat-nodes /data-cache/flat-node-cache/flat.nodes /data-postgres/planet-latest.osm.pbf

The initial steps of the import have gone extremely fast, but its been sitting at Building index on table: planet_osm_ways for days without change. htop indicates active Postgres processeses for checkpoint process and CREATE INDEX. When I log into Postgres and check select * from pg_stat_activity; I see an active state for CREATE INDEX planet_osm_ways_nodes ON planet_osm_ways USING gin (nodes) WITH (FASTUPDATE=OFF) ;

Following the advice in this post I looked for the table place, but the response was Did not find any relation named "place".

Does this sound normal? This is time-sensitive and having already been waiting the better part of a week, I am a little worried something has wrong. Are their other Postgres settings that could speed this part of the process?