Enlarge image
Shut down since December 2021: The Rahmede viaduct of the A 45
Photo: Dieter Menne / dpa
The clarification of who is responsible for the closure of the Rahmedetal motorway bridge on the A45 and the associated traffic chaos around Lüdenscheid will have a parliamentary aftermath: According to SPIEGEL information, the SPD and FDP will announce a corresponding committee of inquiry in Düsseldorf this Tuesday from 1:15 p.m.
The two opposition factions had been threatening this step for weeks, now it is becoming concrete and could have unpleasant consequences for North Rhine-Westphalia's Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst (CDU), among other things.
more on the subject
NRW Prime Minister Wüst and the scandal bridge: the mistakes of others by Lukas Eberle and Tobias Großekemper
North Rhine-Westphalia: The bridge debacle in the Sauerland - a failure with an announcement by Lukas Eberle and Gerald Traufetter
Autobahn 45: Abandoned bridge must be demolished
Wüst was Minister of Transport in North Rhine-Westphalia between 2017 and 2021.
During this time, the start of construction for the damaged Rahmedetalbrücke was postponed several times, and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia awarded an order for a replacement of the bridge in 2015.
In December 2021, Autobahn GmbH had the dilapidated bridge closed, and for around 14 months, around 15,000 cars and around 6,000 trucks have been jammed on the region’s bypass roads every day.
Parts of an e-mail exchange between Wüst's former ministry, the State Chancellery and the then responsible Landesbetrieb Straßen.NRW are said to have been deleted.
The communication is said to have been about the postponed new building plans.
Wüst last defended himself on the subject in the state parliament in mid-February.
Mistakes were made and in 2014 there was a failure to invest in the bridge.
When he took office in 2017, he was confronted with a restructuring backlog, there had been “no political decisions about what would happen when”.
question of political responsibility
The committee of inquiry will now clarify how the bridge could have been closed or whether it could have been avoided.
Opposition circles say they want to be clear about who made what decisions when and who is politically responsible.
In order to prevent such a debacle in the future, it is also necessary to know which mistakes were actually made.
A fifth of the votes of the parliamentarians are needed to set up a parliamentary investigative committee that can hear witnesses and has court-like powers, a total of 39. The SPD has 56 votes, the FDP involved has 12.
tgk