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. Since 2001, we have been supporting our client in the €800 million rede­vel­op­ment of the harbour area into a high-quality environment for living and working by the River Main. Through a flexible remediation and development strategy, we facilitated the site’s repurposing while ensuring cost certainty for investors. Through a flexible remediation and development strategy, we facilitated the site’s repurposing while ensuring cost certainty for investors. As part of this revi­tal­i­sa­tion project, we conducted detailed cont­a­m­i­nated site inves­ti­ga­tions to identify pollutant-affected areas and carefully accounted for the reactive potential of individual substances to ensure safe and sustainable rede­vel­op­ment.

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. Existing remediation measures were integrated into this approach. Addi­tion­ally, we conducted noise and vibration monitoring to protect nearby structures and residents while minimising potential distur­bances. 

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.

Our Services within this Project:

• Contaminated Site Assessment
• Construction Supervision
• Deconstruction Planning
• Development of a Geographic Information System (GIS)
• Evidence Preservation
• Geotechnical Investigation
• Groundwater and Soil Remediation Concept Development
• Hydrogeological Data Collection
• Noise Forecasting
• Planning and Supervision of Groundwater Remediation Systems
• Pollution Investigation
• Vibration Monitoring