After succession of errors, Berlin airport leaves the paper 8 years...

The inauguration of BER was scheduled for mid-2012. Instead, it will take place this October 31, after countless technical and political failures. How could such a disaster occur in the country of efficiency and high technology? There were so many mistakes in the construction of the Berlin-Brandembugo Airport (BER), that it is difficult to say which was the biggest. The inspection carried out after the first canceled opening, in June 2012, listed about 120 thousand defects.

Among them, some as serious as an inoperable fire-fighting system, thousands of automatic doors with no electrical connection and falling parking ceilings. Thousands of kilometers of electrical cables had been threaded into too narrow ducts, apparently at random or in prohibited combinations.

It took architects, engineers, technicians and masons eight years to fix this chaos. “If you wrongly button the first button on a jacket and reach the top, there’s no way: you need to undo all the buttons before you can start buttoning again,” explained in 2014 Hartmut Mehdorn, who, for a short time, was director of the airport, but soon gave up.

Until the opening, scheduled for this Saturday (10/31), altogether the official opening date of BER had to be canceled and postponed six times. Construction costs jumped from the initial 2.5 billion euros to more than 7 billion euros – for an aviation hub that will function below its capacity during the covid-19 pandemic, but that is expected to be too small soon. Thus, the airport company already plans for another expansion for 2030, with costs estimated at 2.3 billion euros.

How could a megaproject in Germany, a country of high technology, have gone so wrong? Three parliamentary commissions of inquiry broke down to try to answer. After going through endless files and interrogating hundreds of witnesses, they filed a report of thousands of pages, concluding that what led to the disaster was incompetence at all levels. But above all, there is a lack of expertise and poor evaluation by the political leadership.

State enters contractor

The idea of ​​an aviation hub in the Berlin-Brandenburg region was born shortly after the reunification of Germany. Five years to plan, five years to build, inauguration during the 2000 Olympic Games in the German capital: that was the equation proposed at the time by the federal government and the two states involved.

As is well known, the Olympic plans came to nothing. In addition, politicians fought until 1996 over exactly where the airport would be built. This did not prevent BER’s state-owned company from prophylactically purchasing 350 million plots of land in various parts of Brandenburg – which ended up not being chosen as the location.

Another seven years went by in the useless search for private investors to design, build and operate the airport: due to the high financial risks, no company wanted to accept the deal without state guarantees. In 2003 the project was practically canceled. But that, the politicians, and above all the then mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, did not want to allow, in any way: and the State entered as a contractor.

“We are going to prove that three public owners are capable of carrying out such a project,” announced Wowereit, grandiloquently, at the beginning of the works, in 2006. At the time, by the way, the project was still called BBI. It was only three years later that the responsible company realized that the International Air Transport Association (Iata) had already assigned the BBI code to Bhubaneswar Airport, India.

This is just a small footnote, which matches something that a veteran of the supervisory board declared a 2017 to Der Spiegel magazine: competence is something that has never passed through the corridors of the airport society.

“BER black box”

When the works started, there were, in fact, plants and projects ready. However, the contractors did not cease to come up with new desires and ideas for architects and engineers to carry out in the midst of the work in progress: additional mezzanines, passenger bridges, commercial areas and food areas. As the European Union’s safety regulations changed, the fire exits had to be completely resized.

This was not without consequences. In retrospect, it was found that already in 2009 the works were behind schedule and going in a bad direction. The following year, the engineering office in charge of the technical updating of the building went bankrupt. The inauguration, scheduled for 2011, has been postponed, although in just eight months.

In his book Blackbox BER, the architect Meinhard von Gerkan would later reveal that the opening dates were set “according to the political calendar, generally with shortened or tightly calculated deadlines, and against the protests of construction management”.

In retrospect, Von Gerkan makes serious accusations: the airport society has repeatedly tried to hide the difficulties of the supervisory board headed by Mayor Wowereit. Between December 2011 and March 2012, construction reports were handled.

“Our red warning arrows indicating that the deadlines could not be met were changed into yellow signs, signaling that the deadline was doable, although only at the expense of extra efforts,” accuses Blackbox BER.

Awarded incompetence and dishonesty

In turn, politicians were eager to believe this optimistic version of the facts. When there were visits to the works, the workers had to build plaster walls in a hurry, so that no one could see what actually happened in the future BER.

Four weeks before the planned opening, it was impossible to continue to make up the flaws. As the anti-fire system and, above all, the sprinkler system did not work, in May 2012 the license to operate was denied.

The policy responded to the fiasco with accusations and mass layoffs. The consulting agency and the architect Von Gerkan were also dismissed – a serious mistake, as would be recognized later. Because the problem was not only that those hired to finish the contract often looked in vain for the documentation of the works – in 2014, piles of binders were found in a landfill: they also lacked information about what had been poorly constructed until then.

Nobody was punished for all this nonsense. Responsible politicians have long since stepped down. When saying goodbye to the capital city hall in 2014, Klaus Wowereit declared that BER “was a bitter defeat, and it is today”.

The project management did not have to answer for the disaster either. On the contrary: one of the two directors of the airport company, dismissed in 2012, subsequently obtained compensation of 1.4 million euros for fees not received.