A construction site like ours is a bit like a living organism. There’s the site office, that’s the brain, and there are the site roads, which are the veins and arteries, and the concrete. That is the lifeblood – however thick – of any construction site. And because the BBI is an especially large site, we even have our own concrete factory.

The main concrete factory was one of the first buildings we put up pretty much exactly two years ago. It is one of the most high-tech in Europe. When we have laid down our shovels and the BBI opens in 2011, a total of 3.4 million tons of concrete will have been produced and used here on site. Now, production is one thing, but how do you get the concrete out of the factory again? With a concrete pump!

The pump is the heart of our construction site, you might say. It pumps the grey mass to the concrete-mixing lorries that take it to wherever we need it. We use a Schwenk M 52. It has an amazing capacity of 80 cubic metres per hour. That’s enough to cover an entire football pitch with 10 centimetres of concrete every hour. But who would want to do that? We prefer to use the concrete to build Europe’s most state-of-the-art airport. I love the steady throbbing sound of the Schwenk, by the way. Because it is the very heartbeat of our airport.

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