The following story is worthy of becoming part of the chronicles of the construction of the Gush Dan light rail project.
A year ago, an American engineer, William (Bill) Stead, received an offer to manage the construction of the project's first line the Red Line from Petah Tikva to Bat Yam. Stead, who managed the construction of underground railways in Boston and San Francisco, enjoys international standing, after he succeeded in rescuing the Athens underground railway project from the mire and completing it in time for the 2004 Olympic Games.
Stead was not put off by the miserable pay that the government company offered him. As a keen archeologist, he was only waiting for an opportunity to work in Israel. But he had clear demands as far as the professional aspects of the post were concerned, demands that left his hosts open mouthed. "I need 200 foreign managers and experts to work under me," the uncompromisingly professional CEO said, "otherwise this project will never get off the ground." "We thought the guy had gone out of his mind," a senior manager at NTA Metropolitan Mass Transit System Ltd., the government company responsible for building the line, told me this week, "There was no way in the world that the Finance Ministry would approve a thing like that." Instead of 200 managers from overseas, they offered Stead three consultants and a promise to expand the professional manpower at the company. Stead thought it over for a few days, and then politely responded, "No thanks."
To this day, NTA has not succeeded in finding a construction manager for the line. "Globes" has learned that the tender for the post was cancelled recently, and CEO Itzhak Zuchman has approached the international consulting companies working with NTA, asking them for names of possible candidates. Zuchman, as reported in "Globes", is in dispute with the company's CFO and has been trying to remove her from her post. For seven months, NTA has had no officiating chairman, and the post of legal counsel is still not manned.
All this is happening in a project several leagues above any other infrastructure project in Israel for complexity and importance. It should be stressed that it's not mission impossible, but when such a complex project is put on the shoulders of a fractious and inexperienced company, failure is a foregone conclusion.
Unmet engineering challenges
Many contractors will agree that the construction of the high-speed rail link between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is the most complicated infrastructure project currently being undertaken outside Gush Dan. The line, in which the total investment is approaching NIS 7 billion, is an afternoon stroll in comparison with the Gush Dan light rail project. On the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem line, the longest pair of tunnels in Israel, 10.5 kilometers in length, are currently being dug. To dig the tunnels, two huge TBM tunneling machines were brought here from overseas. Each 150-meter long machine needs an extensive logistical array: in the operations area near Sha'ar Hagay there are three cement works, two segment prefabrication plants, the biggest conveyor belt in Israel for moving earth from the tunnel, and storage areas for thousands of concrete parts from which the walls of the tunnel are constructed.
For the Red Line in Tel Aviv, a pair of eleven-kilometer tunnels is planned, but the tunneling work will be carried out by not two, but eight(!) TBM machines, working simultaneously. Where exactly will the logistics area be found for the plants, conveyor belts and storage space for the thousands of segments and other components for operating them? As yet there is no clear answer to that. NTA has been examining the possibility of establishing the logistics area where the homeless encampment currently is near the Arlozorov railway station, but that won't be enough. NTA intends to move the thousands of tonnes of cement, gravel, sand and earth that the project will consume and produce daily by means of trucks and cement mixers that will clog the busy roads of the big city. Another logistical challenge will be presented by the groundwater filling the lower layers. The water has to be pumped out constantly, but should there be a rainstorm such as that which made the Ayalon burst its banks last year, the whole project will be in danger of drowning.
Alongside the challenge of the unstable ground is the no less complex challenge of digging tunnels in the middle of a busy city. Will the tunneling weaken the foundations of the office buildings, shops and apartment buildings above the route? No-one really has any idea. NTA has already started to inspect the stability of the first residential buildings, but this work is only at the initial stages. During the project, NTA intends to install sensors in thousands of Tel Aviv buildings. The systems, which will operate for years, are supposed to provide warning of ground movements that could weaken the buildings' foundations. Still, despite all the precautions, NTA estimates that the collapse of buildings is inevitable if it happened in the main cities of Western Europe, there is no reason that it should not also happen here.
Apropos important cities, in Amsterdam, a city with similar ground characteristics to those of Tel Aviv, a light railway has been under construction since 1994, and is planned to be completed by 2017. "The Dutch are considered the number one experts in the world at constructing infrastructures in water-saturated areas," says NTA, "and even they are taking more than twenty years to build an underground railway."
As if all the many engineering difficulties were not enough, an operating model has been chosen for the light rail project that is considered exceptionally complicated.
The Red Line route stretches 23 kilometers, from Petah Tikva to Bat Yam. On the section from the Geha interchange in the north to the municipal border of Tel Aviv in the south, which is about eleven kilometers long, the railway will go underground. The operating model stipulates that, above ground, the railway should behave as a light rail system (tram) in every respect, but that below ground it should operate as an underground railway (metro). The frequency of trains above ground will be one every five minutes at peak hours, driven manually. Below ground, the frequency will be double a train every 2.5 minutes, driven automatically. This model is currently operated in only two cities: in The Hague and in Ankara. It requires the drivers to develop high skill in switching between automatic and manual modes.
In addition, the electrical tension selected for the entire project is 1,500 volts, which is suitable for an underground railway, but not for a light rail. "These requirements are not impossible to meet, but they are very complex," says one of the international suppliers that plans to bid for the project, "In the end, anything can be done, it's only a matter of price." The problem is that on the operational side of the railway and the associated systems, NTA currently employs just two professionals with substantial experience.
The bureaucracy of five cities
Another area, one in which there is actually no lack of people with experience, is dealing with the bureaucracy. The lesson of the Jerusalem Light Rail project is that a private concessionaire finds it very difficult to obtain all the permits required from the municipality. For that reason, this time around, it was decided to transfer dealing with the obtaining of permits to a government company. Sources involved in the project say however that this is not enough: NTA will find it very hard to push the project through without legislation giving it preferential status over all the competing interests of dozens of bodies and authorities operating in the area of the planned project. The company will have to coordinate the shifting of water, sewage, communications, lighting and power infrastructures, without having any preference over the work plans of, say, Israel Electric Corporation.
If, in Jerusalem, the concessionaire had to cope with one municipality and two or three problematic department heads, here it will have to cope with five municipalities with all their various departments, each with its own procedures and ways of doing things: from an orderly municipality like Tel Aviv, to an ad hoc municipality like Bnei Brak. Each of these municipalities will expect a host of benefits from NTA, not to mention quid pro quo deals, in exchange for its cooperation. Jerusalem, which gained investment in infrastructure upgrades and cosmetic improvements to the tune of more than NIS 1 billion, has set a high threshold of expectation.
Officials at the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Transport tried to make life easier for NTA by setting up a metropolitan authority that would take over all powers of issuing permits in the realm of transport, but the move was scuttled by Minister of Transport Yisrael Katz. "The right model for NTA would have been one similar to that of the Cross Israel Highway, with all the construction being carried out by a private contractor as a turnkey project," says a source well versed in the details of the project, "The company should not be involved at all in constructing the project; it has its work cut out for it vis-a-vis the bureaucracy."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 24, 2013
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