It was the first good news in months. Last Tuesday, specialists performed what's known as a "hot gas smoke test" on the fire safety system at Berlin's new airport, finally giving the facility's operating company something positive to report. "Initial results show a successful exercise," the company' press office was quick to report, explaining that "despite a simulated power failure," smoke created in a controlled fire "escaped the building safely."
For a moment it seemed there was a glimmer of hope for Berlin-Brandenburg Airport. After all, since the scheduled opening date was pushed back by nine months in May, it has been generating nothing but negative headlines. Embarrassing setbacks have been plentiful.
The favorable test, though, would seem not to have turned things around. Even as the smoke was escaping from the terminal into the Berlin sky as planned, dark storm clouds were gathering elsewhere around the multi-billion euro project, plagued as it has been by sloppy planning and construction delays. Furthermore, the project faces potential damages claims worth at least €80 million ($98 million). Lawyers around Germany are currently poring over a complaint the airport operator filed against architectural firm gmp in mid-June at the regional court in Potsdam, capital of the state of Brandenburg where the airport is located.
The myriad documents on the case, which together fill a good half dozen binders, read like a recipe for disaster. They suggest that by the spring of 2009, airport officials were aware of significant problems, including the fire safety issues which ultimately ended up forcing the opening date back to next spring. The documents also detail notifications of defects filed by the airport operator. These should have served early on to raise a red flag for the project's supervisory board, which includes Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit and Brandenburg Governor Matthias Platzeck -- assuming the board was aware of the notifications at all.
'Barely Manageable'
If these documents are to be believed, the planning phase for the airport saw far too much emphasis on architectural design and too little on functionality. Particularly the terminal security and automated systems that are at the heart of this prestigious project are said to have suffered from this reversal of priorities, according to the complaint, which describes an "unnecessarily complex" concept designed according to "purely visual considerations," which proved to be "barely manageable" in its implementation.
All together, the complaint amounts to well over 1,000 pages and helps reconstruct the scandal around the airport whose true opening date it seems no one can predict. The internal documents, which include correspondence between the architects and the airport operator, as well as various records, contracts and expert reports, offer illuminating pieces of a puzzle that add up to a megalomaniac picture. They document the way the public was misled, and they tarnish the image of an icon in the world of architecture, Meinhard von Gerkan, who has contracts around the globe, but whose employees apparently weren't capable of applying the same diligence to technical details as they did to the artistic aspects of their design.
This tale of hubris and failure began in 2009. That was three years after Germany's Federal Administrative Court approved construction of a new airport for the German capital, to be named after Willy Brandt, and one year before Mayor Wowereit oversaw the topping-out ceremony. The airport's operating company, which includes representation from the city-state of Berlin, the state of Brandenburg and the federal government, hired Gerkan's renowned architectural firm gmp, which in turn enlisted Frankfurt-based architectural firm JSK to oversee commercial aspects and a mid-sized engineering firm to take care of complex technical solutions. Together, these companies formed a general contractor known as the Berlin-Brandenburg International Planning Consortium, or "pg bbi," and initially set the airport's opening date for October 30, 2011.
It was an ambitious timeline, and one that would soon prove misguided. In June 2010, Wowereit and airport director Rainer Schwarz announced the opening date would be pushed back by seven months, to early June 2012. At the time, they cited the EU's stricter safety standards as the cause for the delay, with the unexpected bankruptcy of the engineering firm in the consortium causing additional upheaval.
Significant Errors
But neither Wowereit nor Schwarz mentioned the most crucial reason. Schwarz already knew then that the contractor's plans for installing building and safety technology, including terminal fire safety systems, were so faulty that construction was massively behind schedule. In its complaint now filed in Potsdam, the airport operator clearly outlines what it concealed at the time: "The postponement of the completion date was without a doubt necessary due to planning deficiencies concerning installation of the building's technical systems."
As early as the spring of 2009, construction companies hired for the project complained of significant errors in the drawings and calculations provided by pg bbi, which they said made on-time completion of the project impossible. An external expert opinion that these construction companies presented to the airport operator on September 30, 2009, supported their case against the architects, but left airport management unimpressed. Instead of pressuring gmp and its associates to make improvements, the airport operator commissioned an external expert opinion of its own -- which "unfortunately reached the same conclusion," according to the complaint now submitted against the architects.
The airport operator's construction specialists began to have doubts about whether Gerkan's company was the right choice for the job. According to the complaint, they even considered terminating pg bbi's contract, but ultimately dropped the idea after "a difficult decision process." Instead, the airport operator made an unusual pact with the planning consortium in November 2010. A "memorandum of understanding" established that the airport operator was "entitled to file claims for compensation for improperly executed planning services," but that it would refrain from asserting such rights "as long as pg bbi makes an effort to complete the project by the contractually established deadline."
Yet even a few weeks later, pg bbi didn't seem to be making all that much of an effort. By the end of the year, work on the airport's safety systems was 15 months behind schedule. Pressure put on the construction companies and additional costs of €20 million succeeded in reducing that delay to 11 months, but it was still clear the new opening deadline would be impossible to meet.
'Impossible to Control'
Gerkan's architects frequently revised their drawings and their calculations for implementing the project, but this had only a limited effect, since they reportedly made new mistakes frequently as well, for example drawing in cable shafts where pipelines were meant to be, failing to indicate precisely where fire dampers should be installed, or even forgetting some fire detectors completely in their blueprints. One inspector noted 2,800 such discrepancies, adding that three quarters of these could be traced back to poor planning -- and that some could have serious consequences.
On January 26, 2011, according to an internal timeline from the airport operator, it became known that "the sprinkler system technology in some parts of the airport wouldn't be operable until sometime between September and December."
In April 2011, the building regulatory authority, known as the BOA, stepped in, expressing considerable concerns. A confidential status report notes that, with a trial operational run scheduled for that November, government inspectors stated: "If the current approach does not change, the project will become impossible to control."
In November, when the trial run should already have been underway, the BOA's concerns apparently escalated into a considerable quarrel with the architects. An internal memo indicates that the airport operator's inspectors were requested to "provide the BOA with obligatory statements at 14-day intervals concerning the status of the facility's safety technology."
Construction inspectors from the administration of the Dahme-Spreewald region, where the airport is located, were not the only ones sounding the alarm at this point. Electronics company Bosch, tasked with installing the airport's safety technology, sent the airport operator repeated complaints of delays, with Bosch's technicians complaining that they were constantly having to break off their work. In November 2011, for example, the technicians reported they were unable to complete the installation of video cameras in the ceiling of one area of the terminal, because when the ceiling was designed, the architects had not taken into account the depth at which the cameras would need to be anchored. Another written complaint from Bosch to the airport operator stated that the company was likewise unable to install surveillance technology in the stairwells, because "access panels are located where the cameras are to be installed."
Problems with the Matrix
As the installation of the airport's security systems and general building technology, including the complex fire safety system, faltered, the supervisory board continued to operate under feigned or true ignorance. Minutes from a supervisory board meeting on December 9, 2011, certainly give the impression that these serious complications came as a surprise the board. The manager in charge of planning and construction, for example, mentions "problems that have recently arisen in the area of fire safety," continuing on to note that important smoke exhaust flaps had been obstructed without the permission of the supervising authorities, and that an additional permit would be necessary in order for the airport to begin operations on time.
The minutes do indicate that Wowereit, as chairman of the board, criticized these issues being "identified so belatedly." But the airport's technical director at the time, Manfred Körtgen, offered his reassurance that "the start date of June 3, 2012, remains realistic."
In hindsight, of course, it seems that only breathtaking naiveté could possibly explain such an assessment on the part of the technical director, who has since been fired. Soon, though, hiding problems at the airport construction site was no longer possible.
In spring 2012, according to a statement later written by the airport operator, "considerable shortcomings in the fire safety design emerged." The original plan for the highly complex system's controls to be fully automated "had to be abandoned." Contractor pg bbi proposed having various tasks performed by hand instead. But according to the statement, even with this "reduced concept" there would have been "extensive problems due to delayed planning," especially in the "fire control matrix and overarching fire safety coordination" designed by pg bbi, and the proposed solution would not have met approval.
The term "fire control matrix" refers to a detailed design meant to provide individual solutions to 310 possible fire scenarios. The statement continues on to say that pg bbi handed this matrix over to an external company, which only resulted in more time lost: The outsourcing failed allegedly due to poor planning.
Postponed
On May 4, 2012, with just a few weeks left before the airport was scheduled to go into operation, the companies working on the project began to rebel against pg bbi. Internal airport documents indicate that technicians had "serious complaints about the fire control matrices." Airport director Schwarz later wrote to pg bbi: "On May 4, you had to admit that it would no longer be possible, following your plans, to complete the necessary tests by the planned start of operations."
It must have been clear to Schwarz by that Friday at the latest that it wouldn't be possible to meet the planned start date. Yet two days later, the Berliner Morgenpost ran an optimistic interview with the airport director. No, Schwarz told the newspaper, he wasn't losing sleep over the imminent opening of the airport; all work necessary to prepare the airport for passengers and air traffic would be finished on time.
Those are embarrassing statements in retrospect, since the entire project made its crash landing just two days later. On May 8, news agencies buzzed with the breaking news that the airport's opening had to be postponed, due to fire safety problems.
Six days after that, the architects wrote to the airport operator, admitting that the opening date had been unrealistic and setting a new date for early January 2013.
But the airport's management wasn't interested in going through the whole thing again with Gerkan and his company. On May 23, the airport operator terminated pg bbi's contract without notice. The six-page termination letter is outraged in tone: "Our trust in you as the general contractor in charge of the project was shaken so irrevocably that we simply cannot be expected to continue this collaboration." For months, the letter continues, architects presented airport management with "unrealistic and flawed scheduling, deliberately choosing to accept" that the airport's opening would have to be delayed at the last minute, resulting in "millions in damages for many parties involved."
Picking Up the Pieces
Because of the ongoing legal dispute, the airport operator and the architectural firms JSK and gmp from the planning consortium pg bbi declined to comment for this article on the occurrences described in the complaint.
The man left to pick up the pieces is Horst Amann, an experienced airport construction manager from Frankfurt. Amann starts as new technical manager for the Berlin airport on August 1. Two weeks later, he'll report back to the supervisory board on whether the airport can be ready to
begin operations by the new opening date of mid-March 2013.
In the German capital, the general mood is one of skepticism -- among the technicians working on the airport, among some politicians and certainly among the general public. Even national railway operator Deutsche Bahn appears to have its doubts about the new opening date, if flyers placed on the seats of one ICE train from Düsseldorf to Berlin last week are any indication. "Please note," Deutsche Bahn advised its passengers in the flyer, "that this train will not stop at Berlin-Brandenburg Airport until further notice." The reason, the railway operator wrote, is that the airport's opening has been delayed "indefinitely."