All clear?

Consistency and resilience are therefore the success factors in combination with a constant eye on the calculated budget and costs. Experience of course helps a lot. Projects such as a sewage treatment plant quickly add up to millions and dozens of partners have to be coordinated. Many employees these days come from all over the world, making communication a real challenge. “A yes does not always mean ‘Yes, understood.’ This is why you have to ensure that the work result and process have really been understood,” emphasises the experienced project manager Cordes. “It’s better to be a nuisance than to find out afterwards that there was an expensive and time-consuming ‘misunderstanding’.” A sewage treatment plant is a surprisingly complex project. The wastewater must be cleaned of all kinds of impurities safely and around the clock. Physical, chemical and biological processes are combined here. Filters are used, as are bacteria that are kept “alive”. The resulting digester gases are used to generate electricity through CHP units (combined heat and power plants) or to heat the premises. Modern wastewater treatment plants are already virtually self-sufficient in this respect today. Despite this, emergency power systems, colloquially known as “emergency generators”, ensure that enough electricity is ready to guarantee water treatment even in an emergency.