27 April 2007: Back and forth If you only knew how much I’ve got on my plate at the moment! Our structure 262 is almost finished and there we are, busy hammering, banging and painting away, putting the last finishing touches before we hand it over. What looked like a huge bathtub a little while ago is now a gigantic, underground tunnel through which trains will be speeding to the BBI in a few years’ time. A big ants’ “well done” to my fellow workers – the lads have got the job done right on schedule. Especially when a construction job is nearing completion, I, as “site spokesman”, seem to be busy all the time. Antonia, my girlfriend, is giving me the cold shoulder yet again because I’ve been coming home so late these past few days. When I started talking about Cat recently, she got up and flounced out of the living room – the classic “Don’t-mention-the-construction-site-situation“ in our relationship. She has an annoying way of pegging my workmates before she knows anything much about them that sometimes drives me to distraction. Yet “Cat“ is the name of a yellow dumper truck that carries tons of soil back and forth every day on its six, big, broad wheels. Now if you thought the construction site was level, you are badly mistaken. We have to level it out. And because soil is a precious commodity, we store it carefully until it is needed and guard it closely. It’s exactly the same story with the groundwater. We lower the groundwater level and channel the water through blue and green pipes into a large ditch, where it is stored and later returned to the ground. But please don’t imagine that all we do here is carry and drive things back and forth. We don’t. And anyway, that wouldn’t work with concrete, which we have to mix fresh, ready for use – and we do that in our own concrete factory. We need 3.4 million tons of concrete to build the BBI – incredible! Uh oh, whenever the subject of millions comes up, I get really dizzy. I had actually been planning to tell you about the runway connections we have been working on since March, but I think I’ll save that for my next entry now.

Wersja drukowana berlin-airport.de (Copyright Berliner Flughäfen)