Power failure in the Charlottenburg town hall and in the area between Nordhauser Straße and Zillestraße Photo: Ufuk Ucta
From Hildburg Bruns
This time, no one expected anything more: standing in line to vote! But that’s exactly what happened on Friday in three electoral offices in City-West. The reason: power failure in large parts of Charlottenburg!
“The water companies destroyed a ring main during construction work,” says City Councilor Heike Schmitt-Schmelz.
From 10:30 a.m. nothing was going on. The voting offices in the town halls of Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf town hall and the Heerstrasse office building were also affected – all computers are connected to the same server. The electoral offices could only be started up again an hour later with the help of an emergency generator.
Luckily there was an emergency drill two weeks ago. The voter lists were therefore printed out once for all streets. That’s why helpers could scroll through the directories and at least work through the election processes by hand. That lasted.
Stromnetz Berlin employees are trying to fix the problem Photo: Ufuk Ucta
The office buildings in Charlottenburg were not fully connected to the power grid until around 2 p.m. The electoral offices had already been closed for an hour anyway – quite regularly.