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posted by martyb on Monday July 01 2019, @07:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the You-Thought-Your-Builders-Were-Bad dept.

Stories about seriously mangled public infrastructure projects keep coming up and even the alleged super-efficient Germans are not exempt. But what would you expect when you change and expand the project while it is being implemented and when you use smaller contractors with no track record for projects like this? the BBC has the story:

As a structure, it looks impressive enough.

Until you pause, look around you, and absorb the silence. This is Berlin Brandenburg or BER, the new, state-of-the-art international airport built to mark reunified Germany's re-emergence as a global destination.

It is a bold new structure, costing billions, and was supposed to be completed in 2012.

But it has never opened.

BER has become for Germany not a new source of pride but a symbol of engineering catastrophe. It's what top global infrastructure expert Bent Flyvbjerg calls a "national trauma" and an ideal way "to learn how not to do things".

[...]Martin Delius, a former Berlin city politician who later headed an extensive inquiry into what went wrong, says those in charge decided "to give 30 to 40 contracts to smaller companies which they thought they could pressurise into giving them lower prices".

"They built a very complex controlling system which didn't work," he says.

Most disruptive of all were decisions to change the size and content of the new airport - while it was being built.

[...]New construction boss Hartmut Mehdorn made a list of all the faults and failures, Mr Delius tells me.

"Small ones like the wrong light bulbs to big ones like all the cables are wrong," he says.

The final total was 550,000 - more than a half a million problems to fix.

Maybe that builder who left a big hole in your dining room wall for a couple of weeks wasn't so bad after all? It wasn't like seven years later, was it?


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Username on Monday July 01 2019, @09:57PM

    by Username (4557) on Monday July 01 2019, @09:57PM (#862172)

    That is usually how construction goes. Hire a company to build it, they sub contract out the different jobs, excavators, builders, electricians, plumbers, etcetc. I believe this is especially true in germany where trade unions are very strong. They just decided to cut out the middle man and hire on the sub contractors directly. These guys do what they are told assuming you know what you're doing. They wont say, sorry this isn't in the blueprint and we would have to get it re-approved by the engineers and architects then send it onto the foreman and inspector to explain the changes to the workers. They will just do it.

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