Is the Escalator Too Short?

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Airport is already starting to feel old and abandoned even before it's open. The short escalators were installed in the race to complete b e r ahead of the planned opening in june 20 Twelfth. High voltage power cables have a tendency to heat up, so workers began stuffing new wires into the cable enclosures like commuters on a tokio subway. A sprinkler system was designed with around thousand sprinkler heads, but the pipes weren't scaled up meaning that some places they didn't work at all. Cleaning up the cable salad has been one of the biggest and most tedious jobs in the year since more than forty kilometers of extra cable channels have been added. More than six

BER has been built twice - the first time incorrectly, the second time incompletely. We hear from Marco, an engineer who worked on site. Employees were busy stealing copper instead of fixing the fire system. Some managers got rich taking bribes. Informers had their coffee poisoned.

Joel and Jöran drive out to the unfinished BER terminal to inspect the too-short escalators that end with stairs. They were just one of 150,000 mistakes discovered in an audit after the 2012 cancellation. Cables were stuffed together in overloaded enclosures - a fire risk. The sprinkler pipes too small to carry the required water. More than 600 fire walls had to be reconstructed. And the builders forgot to install lightning rods.

Even when it's fixed, BER will need another overhaul: "As soon as they open it they have to modernize it," Marco says. "The technology is old standards. New airports are already building in a different way. This is going to be from the beginning an old airport."

But finally, heads are starting to roll... the wrong heads. The BER supervisory board fires the only people who know what's going on, creating new chaos. Then they fire the CEO Rainer Schwarz, but bungle the paperwork. Will any politician ever take responsibility?

How To F#€k Up An Airport is presented by Radio Spaetkauf and RadioEins. Producer: Joel Dullroy Presenters: Joel Dullroy, Maisie Hitchcock, Jöran Mandik and Daniel Stern Music: Ducks! Artwork: Jim Avignon