Fortunately, a replacement is already in place in Rindsdorf, so the old building was ready for demolition. However, the old bridges have one thing in common: Like thousands of other motorway bridges, they date from the 1960s, none of them meet today’s standards and can no longer withstand the traffic, which has long since tripled.
There is great distress on Germany’s autobahns. Sometimes lanes are blocked, then barriers or even stop signs regulate truck traffic. Or, as with the Rahmede viaduct, the “worst case” occurs, as the motorway builders call it: sudden full closure due to the risk of collapse.
Like Rindsdorf, Rahmede is on the Sauerland line, which connects the eastern Ruhr area with the Rhine-Main area and is the lifeline of South Westphalia. There are 60 spectacular valley bridges on the route – all of them dilapidated. And it doesn’t look much better nationwide.
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The focus is on the prestressed concrete bridges of the 1960s and 1970s. The construction was considered the ultimate at the time. According to the Federal Highway Research Institute (Bast), 11,386 bridges were built at that time, together with those on federal roads, almost 20,000.
Two thirds of them are prestressed concrete bridges. But steel bridges also suffer from rust and the immense traffic that is now causing the buildings to vibrate. The Federal Ministry of Transport speaks of 3,000 to 4,000 problematic bridges, but there are probably far more, as experts assume.
The problem is known, but nothing has been done for a long time
The motorway bridges were all designed for a service life of 80 to 100 years. “Today, after 30 or 40 years, the bridges are flying in our faces,” reports an experienced bridge engineer.
Dilapidated motorway bridges could become a serious logistics problem.
(Photo: imago images/Rene Schulz)
Small construction errors or deformed steel girders as in Rahmede mean the end. Experts in the transport committee of the Düsseldorf state parliament said that the damage in Rahmede would not slowly increase, but that there would be a “sudden failure. There’s a bang and then it’s down.” Despite the latest technology, predictions are not possible. The fear of a catastrophe like in Genoa is spreading.
The problems have been known for almost 20 years, but there has only been a special pot in the federal budget for nine years. The old valley bridge in Rindsdorf, for example, has been closed to heavy goods traffic since 2011. It takes until the construction, that’s how long the construction experts predict the service life. In Schleswig-Holstein, for example, the Rader Hochbrücke on the central north-south axis A7 has to be renewed by 2026.
“Unfortunately, the number of dilapidated bridges is so large that we won’t be able to do it in a reasonable time frame,” say insiders. That means: When in doubt, more bridges must be closed.
The managing director of the responsible motorway company has announced: “We have to double the number of bridges to be renewed every year from 200 to 400.” However, the company itself is still a long way from the 200 bridges. She currently lists 42 projects that she is either planning or currently implementing. Deges, a federal and state company responsible for major projects, is currently handling a further seven projects. At most, 70 projects per year are currently realistic, insiders report.
Employees flee the Autobahn company
The motorway company was unable to use half a billion euros of its budget last year. The main reason was the chaos in the new organization. After the federal and state governments had agreed in 2017 to centralize the highway administration, the GmbH has been doing more bad than good since 2021. The IT didn’t work, construction companies were waiting for their money and as a last resort had to stop work on the construction sites or went to the dunning courts.
Especially in the new Berlin headquarters, things went haywire, employees fled quickly, there were out-of-court settlements and ongoing court proceedings. But important autobahns in the regions have also given up in frustration: the project manager for the important and controversial Riederwald tunnel project in downtown Frankfurt is moving back to the Hessian state administration.
The Autobahnzentrale has at least set up round tables with the construction industry to clarify problems directly. But this by no means solves a major problem: there is a lack of skilled workers, especially civil engineers. In the case of an emergency in Rahmede, for example, the Westphalia autobahn branch has seconded 15 employees and was fortunately able to recruit seven more engineering offices.
However, the shortage of skilled workers in construction is now immense. The competence center for securing skilled workers has determined that in 2021 an average of 29 unemployed people were registered nationwide in the engineering profession “construction planning of traffic routes and systems” with this career aspiration, while there were 394 vacancies nationwide.
According to available calculations, the number of vacancies in the broader job profile of engineer for construction planning and supervision exceeds the number of unemployed by a factor of about eight.
“Civil engineers for planning and monitoring are almost impossible to find, and in the meantime an increasing shortage of skilled workers is also becoming apparent in the implementation professions from foremen to civil engineering,” warns Thomas Puls from the German Economic Institute, which runs the competence center on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Economics leads.
Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP) is already planning a new special program for bridges. His party had already called for this in the Bundestag in 2006, when the problems with the bridges became known. The grand coalition refused at the time. Now the traffic light coalition has to pay for the mistakes of the previous governments, criticizes the transport politician of the Greens in the Bundestag Stefan Gelbhaar and makes it clear: “We have to put the financial and personnel focus on the bridge renovation and the replacement new building.”
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