Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @06:08AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @06:08AM (#862299)

    What is the longest tenure for a British PM? I can only remember Thatcher who was in power for about 10 years. Germany on the other hand suffered 16 years under Kohl and now 14 years under Merkel.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @06:52AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @06:52AM (#862306)

    If you mean contiguous, it's thin, but Gladstone clocked a dozen or so years across a few parliaments, as did one of his competitors, the Marquess of Salisbury.

    If you go right back to the early days, Walpole was in it for about twenty years, but you could make an argument that he wasn't elected as we understand it today.

    Pitt was in place for a similar period, but in general it has been the exception rather than the rule.