In early 1978, on my first arrival to Germany....I ended up at a dorm on Rhine Main Air Base, which had been newly renovated by the Germans. It was a 1950s-type of building, with new carpet, new heating, new windows, etc. Each room had a GE full size refrigerator.
I had been there three days when my 'roomie' sat down and explained electrical wattage. To be honest, my entire knowledge of electrical information could be put on a 3x5 inch card at that point in time.
So this major issue existed with the room. It had one breaker for each room, and once you added up what the refrigerator used...with maybe the lights, a radio, and a fan....you were pretty much at the peak of wattage for the room. So in simple terms....NO coffee machine could exist in the room. The dorm manager had instituted this no coffee machine rule, and every few months, a stupid inspection would occur, and someone would be going onto the bad-boy list because of a added stupid coffee machine.
I asked why such limited voltage, and it always came back to German expectations of young GI's and the building structure....didn't matter if you were German or American, no one in the 1970s expected a young 20-something guy to have a coffee machine in the dorm.
As the years went by, microwaves got into the mix, along with a dozen odd electrical consumption items. The dorms for Air Force or Army personnel in Germany? They stayed along the same guidelines. A lot of the Army dorms rarely if ever got major renovations.
So I bring this up today....because this odd story came out in the Frankfurt news (via HR, public TV in Hessen).
Up in north Frankfurt, there's an old Army air field, known by Bonames Maurice Rose Airfield (at least from the 1950s to mid 1980s).
Over the last couple of years....with refugees part of the landscape for Frankfurt, they needed 'housing', so they turned to the old barracks/dorms left on Bonames, and simply made them into refugee housing.
No one really asked questions or did any site surveys. If they had....this electrical issue would have come up.
So over the past couple of months, various issues were brought up by the residents of the temp housing situation.
Why? They had gotten to the point where coffee machines, microwaves, electric skillets, and high voltage items were being used, and flipping the circuit breakers. In simple terms, they were getting closer and closer to an event where an electrical fire would break out.
Last night....the city shows up and cuts the power to the building, because the occupants weren't listening. You can imagine the tension rapidly rose.
This was done in a fairly stupid fashion, without a lot of thought over the implications of cut power, or a decent plan 'B'.
HR did a good report over the event and worth reading.
The city eventually reached some point with the 300-odd residents, and offered up hotel lodging. In this offer, it's a bit of a surprise.....only 68 of the folks accepted the hotel deal. Oddly enough, upon carried over to the hotel (name left out of the story).....they quickly assessed this as being unsatisfactory, and 50 of 68 said 'no way'.....returning to the dorm structure.
Resolving this partially by 11 PM? That's more or less the outcome of this.
It'll likely continue to be this emergency problem for the weekend, where the city folks are unable to resolve this mess without paying a fair sum of money.
So this all goes back to the general standard of the 1970s.....low wattage expectations in military-style dorms. The city management not understanding this? That's part of the story as well....it would appear that no really reviewed the structure or it's limitations.
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