> In 2014 it was revealed that Alfredo di Mauro, the chief planner for the airport’s fire protection system, was not a qualified engineer but an engineering draftsman. He admitted this, saying everyone thought he was a proper engineer and ‘he didn’t contradict them.’
> His mistakes have cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fix.
As a tangent, not to belittle the corruption around BER, and with more tongue in cheek than snark: I wonder how many people responsible for things on this list https://hn.algolia.com/?q=breach (insofar the cause was negligence) have "software engineer" in their job title or description? If you ctrl+F "engineer" in those articles and discussions, you'll see it thrown about quite casually. If architecture was like software, buildings would regularly just collapse, and sudden death would just be an accepted risk risk of going into a building or walking past one. Some people would complain about that, but we would consider them idealists and their demands incompatible with progress and prosperity.
That's not all. Signs of poor planning and poor execution seem to be everywhere. Pipes for a central water cooling system for IT and other electronics were supposedly embedded directly into concrete walls instead of into shafts and the system was known to have too little capacity before the building was supposed to open. One escalator turned out to be too short when delivered. Instead of fixing the escalator, they extended it by adding regular stairs to the end. The contents of cable shafts in the building is completely unknown. Nobody knows anymore. New cables are thrown in randomly to suit current needs. Some shafts seem to have already filled up completely because of that.
The management of the construction site has also been a complete disaster. I don't recall how many tech leads had to go because of allegations of corruption, for example.
These are just the worst issues that I remeber. The smoke ventilation was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
>The smoke ventilation system was originally designed to rely on fans to blow the smoke downwards in the ventilation shafts. As far as I know, nobody had tried to build a system like this before. Rumor has it that ventilation pipes even imploded during a test.
Well I do know of places where this has been done. It's not as failsafe as having a duct which relies on the stack effect but you have additional fans and redundant power supplies etc to make sure the system does not fail. Also the fans suck air through the system to the smoke extract outlet point as you want the pressure inside the duct to be lower than inside the building otherwise you risk blowing smoke into other parts of the building. Ducts imploding sounds like a problem with smoke dampers not activating correctly. Confusion about which dampers should be operating would be caused by a big last minute change to the layout of the spaces inside the building, which brings me back to wondering if it was because they introduced a lot more shopping area where there was none before because this is a classic last minute change in airport design that has caused problems with other airports. Big changes to space utilisation are going to cause delays and budget overruns once you have got passed the concept sketch stage.
> One escalator turned out to be too short when delivered. Instead of fixing the escalator, they extended it by adding regular stairs to the end.
Would be a major and obvious crowd safety problem and a contravention of regulations in many countries, I am assuming this would also be the case in a well regulated country like Germany. Which is why I find it hard to believe that this would be installed, rather than sent back to the factory and extended.
It's a question of managing expectations, every building is a prototype and loads of things go wrong all the time. I have heard of all the problems you describe happening on other projects for both public and private sector clients, they were just fixed and everything carried on. What you are describing has details that don't sound technically correct, so it seems like there is someone out there running a smear campaign to deflect blame from whoever made the big change to the brief, which makes me curious to know what the truth is.
For government clients airports are adverts for cities and a symbol of municipal pride so they like something that is spectacular, but private sector clients want a shopping mall with passengers winding through intestine like corridors full of shops on their way to the airplanes parked outside. Changing from one model to the other halfway through is not going to be a smooth process.
A major brief change or an unclear starting brief is what causes building (and software) projects to go late and over budget, not lots of little things like what you are describing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Suárez_Madrid–Barajas_A...
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