Bombardier Transportation in Bautzen
Last summer the town of Bautzen experienced its worst flooding in more than 100 years. Numerous bodies of water in the area overflowed their banks. The floodwaters swept right through the production facilities of Bombardier Transportation, including the recently modernized warehouse, which was located in the lowest terrain. The Spree River, which had been diverted in 1996, returned to its old bed, taking huge masses of mud and debris through the plant of the world’s leading producer of rail equipment.
Specialists from viastore who visited the site after the waters receded saw a scene of destruction: the entire plant had been flooded. In the warehouse power lines, phone lines and network connections had been cut. To enter, they needed flashlights and rubber boots. In the picking department the water was still up to 1.20 meters deep, and in lower places, for example in the automatic high-bay warehouse, the depth was about 1.8 meters. Since the warehouse was urgently needed, a rapid recovery plan was chosen: the warehouse had to be back in operation in two weeks.
viastore quickly put together a hard-working team to handle the crisis, including staff from purchasing, project management and business management. The goal was to act quickly, without red tape. The fact that part of the warehouse had been modernized just two weeks before the flood turned out to be an advantage because replacement parts could easily be obtained for the areas that had been modernized. viastore project manager Veit Roskamp described some of the work: “In the automatic small-parts warehouse mud-filled plastic containers had to be removed, emptied and cleaned. The conveyor systems for pallets and containers were totally submerged, making it necessary to replace all the drives and sensors. The control cabinets were half-submerged. First we drained the conveyor system rollers, and later we replaced them. The storage and retrieval machines were in even worse condition: we had to remove all of the drives for the load handling devices and base units and send them back to the manufacturer for reworking. We replaced the power bars and removed the rust from the crane rails. As a part of this, we had to rework or replace almost all of the mechanical and electrical systems. It was a huge organi zational task, and all of it had to be carried out during the main vacation period.”
But the repair work could not be carried out unimpeded. At one point THW, Germany’s technical disaster prevention service, intervened to clear the premises because the Spree was threatening to overflow its banks again. A thousand employees and 400 clean-up personnel were affected. Even so, they held to their schedule, and two weeks later the system was back in operation. Bombardier was able to deliver again.
