Living and Working on the Water - a New Business and Residential District for Offenbach

The former industrial harbour in Offenbach am Main is seeing a revival as a new city quarter. For more than half a century, this area of around 320,000 m² had been used for warehousing and transshipment of petroleum products, scrap metals and goods such as sand, gravel and coal. We have been supporting our customers in a €800 million project to redevelop the harbour area into a quality environment for living and working on the River Main since 2001.

A major chal­lenge was ensuring that all reg­u­la­tory re­quire­ments were met to satisfy local au­thor­i­ties of the ef­fec­tive­ness of the re­me­di­a­tion efforts and fa­cil­i­tate suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing of the re­de­vel­oped site. To aid in meeting this chal­lenge and in close cooperation with our client and the local authorities, we created a model that allowed for the nec­es­sary re­me­di­a­tion measures while max­i­mising the freedom to develop the site. This model also in­cor­po­rated existing re­me­di­a­tion measures.

We developed a geographic information system (GIS) for the area to facilitate data management and generate a uniform and comprehensive area map. This involved compiling 20,000 records from various plots of land. Accurate recordings of hydrogeological parameters and contamination inventory went into tightly specified safety concepts for highly contaminated areas in the aquifer. The project includes removing remaining soil contamination at further building development stages as well as draining the excavation pits to achieve further contaminant reductions.