It's time to tell you how we prepared the Luzhniki stadium for the World Cup. The INSYSTEMS and LANIT-Integration team got low-voltage, fire-fighting, multimedia and IT systems. It's actually too early to write memoirs. But, I'm afraid, when the time comes for this, there will be a new reconstruction, and my material will become outdated.
Reconstruction or new construction
I love history very much. I freeze in front of the house of some century there. Sacred delight covers when they say that the name lived here (wow, it was in this tank that the famous writer threw garbage). But when asked where to live, the majority, I think, will choose a new house with modern communications and security facilities. This is because the standards of our life over the past 200 years have changed very much. Even 20 years ago things were different.
Therefore, the reconstruction of old buildings and their adaptation to modern use is always more difficult than new construction. In the old dimensions, it is necessary to place modern engineering systems and comply with all building codes and regulations. Sometimes such a task is impossible in principle. Then special specifications are issued. That is, all construction participants spread their hands: “We couldn’t ...”
When Russia received the right to host the World Cup, no one had any questions about which stadium would be the main one. Of course, Luzhniki, where all the main sporting events of our country took place: the legendary Lev Yashin played his last match there in the presence of 103 thousand spectators, there was the opening and closing of the Olympics-80 (and for the first time in the USSR they sold Fanta and Coca-Cola for 1 ruble for a bottle).
Luzhniki, who has forgotten, hosted the Champions League final in 2008, and in 2013 the World Athletics Championship. It seemed like we didn't have to do anything. Everything is ready and tested in practice.
A person far from sports will never understand why it was necessary to spend 24 billion rubles on reconstruction. Only the Grand Sports Arena! Apart from inspection pavilions, accreditation center, volunteer center, on-site parking!
And the answer is this: huge, simply unrealistic money has come to sports in general (and football in the first place). And industry standards in construction have also changed. And the Ministry of Internal Affairs has new requirements for objects with a mass stay of people. Something appeared in both the FSO and the FSB. And the requirements of FIFA (the international football federation, which was the organizer of the World Cup) were changing right before our eyes, during inspection visits.
The numbers speak for themselves. 20 years ago, the most expensive football player cost 25 million euros. It was the Brazilian Ronaldo - the super-mega-star of those years. And last year, 22-year-old Sasha Golovin left for the eminent but provincial Monaco for 30 million. But the 20-year-old Frenchman Mbappe moved to PSG for 200 million. The most amazing thing is that these costs pay off.
By selling the rights to television broadcasts. The World Cup ended up being watched by 3,5 billion viewers. For this to happen, a state-of-the-art TV broadcasting system was needed.
- At the expense of tickets (I was shown tickets for the final match of the World Cup, the nominal price of which was 800 thousand rubles).
- Due to the widespread sale of snacks, drinks, souvenirs. Follow the logic: in order to sell a lot of goods in a limited area, many rich buyers must gather in this place. What needs to be done to get them there? They should be interesting, fun, comfortable and safe.
- By selling ... prestige and exclusivity. The most “major” seats at the stadium are in sky boxes. These are rooms located at the most convenient height along the entire ring of stands. Each is designed for 14 people. It has its own bathroom and kitchen, 2 large TVs. And access to your own beach. Excuse me, podium. Sky box rental for 7 World Cup matches cost $2,5 million. Looking ahead, I’ll say that 102 of them were built, and it turned out to be few.
Literally a month before the start of the World Cup, the restaurant had to be urgently converted into another 15 temporary sky boxes. Have you multiplied? Have you already compared the proceeds from the rental of sky boxes with the cost of the entire reconstruction? (It's a pity that almost all of this money went to FIFA.)
So: there was nothing of this in Luzhniki.
And it was hard to see from almost any vantage point. Because because of the running tracks and the small slope of the stands, everything was very, very far away.
At the same time, the city authorities decided to preserve the historical facade of Luzhniki. And so began the "reconstruction". When I first got to the arena, the dismantling was already over and the stadium looked like a scenery from the movie Shirley Myrli. Remember Vnukovo Airport?
So everything, apart from the historic façade, was redone. As it turned out later, not in vain. For example, when they were making a "pie" of the field, they dug up a trolley (there was a surprise from the last reconstruction, such a "signature of the master"). There was no waterproofing at all, but there was a direct connection between the stadium lawn and the Moscow River. Probably to justify the name. "Luzhniki" - it's from flood meadows.
History in brief
Memory is arranged in such a way that over time only pleasant memories remain. And photos helpfully help to resurrect all the bright moments. Here we are taking pictures in the center of the field (and photographing, by the way, the fire inspector, who was allowed to walk around the field so that he would forget about the "jambs" that he had just observed during the tests), for the first time they turned on the scoreboard (and the second something didn’t want to work), “Victory Day” rumbles in the empty bowl of the stadium (an hour before that, I realized that everything was gone).
I deleted a long time ago the photos of a dusty and at the same time wet hell, which I showed to the construction curator from the Moscow government (according to the schedule, we had to install and launch IT equipment there).
But even now I remember how difficult and… scary it was.
It’s scary because they did a lot for the first time, because of the scale, because of responsibility (everyone is free to decide to whom he bears it). I don’t know what the guys we worked with thought, but I felt like Boriska from the movie Andrei Rublev by Tarkovsky. He also pretended to be a specialist and contracted to cast a bell, but "the father - the dog - died, but did not pass on the secret." So he did everything on a whim. And did!
But he was alone, and we have a team. And everyone helped each other, supported, reassured. Not everyone could handle the pressure. One morning they “lost” the foreman. The phone is not available. The wife says: “In the morning I got into the car and went to work.” Through the traffic police began to look for a car. The last time the camera caught how he turned from the Moscow Ring Road into the region (there was nothing for him to do there). In general, for 3 days no one knew anything, they thought the worst. Found on the fourth day. In Rostov-on-Don. They said the guy had a nervous breakdown.
And our GUI, a reasonable and phlegmatic person in life, somehow snatched the phone from the interlocutor and threw it into a concrete wall. Then a fight broke out, the police arrived, and everyone was taken to the police station. There they reconciled.
Add People
The vertical of control, in which everyone wants to excel in front of the superior, works like this. The installer reports to the foreman that he laid 100 meters of cable before lunch. The foreman understands that there is still half a day ahead and reports to the foreman that today we will lay 200 meters (the stadium is very large, the foreman never found out that his worker was thrown to move the warehouse in the afternoon). The foreman orders to speed up the work and reports to the head of the section that by the end of the day we will push up and lay 300 meters. And then it's clear. As streams flow into a river, so does this embellished information go higher and higher. And the reality becomes more and more beautiful.
And now the Mayor is informed that the stadium will be commissioned in 3 months, that is, six months ahead of schedule. The mayor speaks on TV against the backdrop of a green field and orders to begin comprehensive testing of all systems. Just to finish in 3 months. And he leaves. And we stay and listen to "Victory Day".
And then we go to a meeting to discuss what to do now. The head of the construction site proposed a completely new and absolutely ingenious solution: “Add people, organize a second shift” (this is probably what Stalin said to Zhukov during the defense of Moscow in 1941).
I must say that the construction at that moment was really coming to an end. And the closer to it, the more qualified people are required. There are always few of them. The decision came by itself: let these same people work in two shifts. The first time I saw people a) come to work at 9:00, b) work until the next morning, c) present work to the inspector, d) eliminate comments and go home before 17:00, e) ... come to work at 9 :00.
It's good that they worked in this mode for a short time. The general contractor one day just turned off the electricity for the night. They did not agree on the rate of a night duty officer for him.
Or here's another story. To assemble and start a fire alarm, you need to mount fire detectors on the ceiling, tie them into a loop like light bulbs in a New Year's garland and connect them to the central station (there are up to 256 devices in the loop, and there are enough loops themselves to protect all premises). Here we go into the team locker room, but there is no ceiling. And there is a comprehensive test plan. Do you think we broke it? No matter how! The photo turned out to be very funny: a large hall, and sensors hanging from the ceiling. A bit like fishing hooks from a diver's point of view.
Swan, 3 crayfish and 5 pike
Today, BIM design has become the industry standard. This is not just a three-dimensional model, but also a specification of equipment and materials, which is automatically generated and corrected. Of course, everything is more complicated in real life than on a computer screen: somewhere they made a mistake with the height, somewhere a beam appeared, somewhere new requirements were received from the customer, and the installation was already done, etc. But in general, when all the designers work in a single information space, errors are an order of magnitude smaller.
But both we and the designers of allied companies started designing Luzhniki in 2014, when BIM models were still exotic.
The peculiarity of the stadium is that, despite the not very large area of under the stands (165 thousand square meters), there is nothing typical there. This is not a high-rise tower, where out of 50 floors 45 are identical.
But still, the stadium is very large and very full of engineering systems. Therefore, there were many contractors. And everyone has their own production culture, accuracy, and just human qualities. Plus, in the course of construction, many changes had to be made to the projects. The result is easy to guess.
Here is one example. The fire automatics system is complicated by the fact that 3 groups of people are involved in its installation and commissioning (the picture does not change much even if they work in the same company): ventilators mount valves (smoke exhaust, air overpressure, fire-retarding) and their actuators , electricians bring power to them, and low-current connect control cables. Everyone does it in accordance with their project. In Luzhniki, where there are about 4000 such devices, three subcontractors had a different number of devices in their projects, and they were located in different places behind the false ceiling. How did we solve this problem? That's right: added people.
Sad and funny
Among other things, we had to mount turnstiles around the entire perimeter of the stadium. This was the second security loop (the first one was installed at the entrance to the territory, there they carried out a personal search and a Fan ID check). And we first decided to put ordinary turnstiles there. But Luzhniki employees explained that there are people who even jump over full-height turnstiles. So, at the entrance to the arena, structures resembling anti-tank hedgehogs with visors appeared.
The turnstiles themselves were also mounted not without incident. At first, we chose the installation sites for a long time, tried on for a long time (so as not to get on the already laid underground communications), waited a long time for the foundations to be poured for us, cut the strobes for laying cables, mounted hatches ... And then one morning we come and see that during the night the entire area around the stadium was paved. And all our markings, strobes and hatches remained under the fresh asphalt. In general, the area became flat, like ... (remember Zhvanetsky's "The Demoman's Tale"?)
We sit and think what to do. But then the construction manager came and said: “You have metal hatches. You can try to find them with a mine detector.”
Or another such story. The location of fire protection equipment (sensors, speakers, buttons, strobe lamps, pointers) is regulated by SNiPs. Well, we installed them and put them into operation. But Luzhniki security experts explained that a crowd of drunken fans would uproot them and press all the manual call points. We had to carry out “anti-vandal measures” (this is the name of the section of the project): something was raised higher, something was taken into the bars, and something ... I won’t say.
And video surveillance is our special pride. Probably nowhere else in the world is there such a density of cameras per square meter. There are 2000 of them at the stadium, not counting a special video surveillance system for spectators, with which you can be sure to recognize a person from the opposite stand. And all of them are integrated into the Safe City system. From the situational center of the stadium (also our work), you can see not only all the images from the arena cameras, but also the territory, and from special workplaces - the entire city.
A lot of trouble was caused by TVs, which we installed more than 1000 pieces at the stadium. We put 3 of them in the VIP box, because the visor above it covered the scoreboard, and a duplicate “picture” was displayed on these TVs.
It turns out that the passions in the VIP box boil no worse than in the fan stands! For example, the king of Spain during the quarterfinal match with Russia broke the TV. They say he accidentally hit ... With a chair, probably.
As with Tarkovsky in Andrei Rublev, everything ended well. And Messi came to the opening match, and the Russian team won both of their matches at Luzhniki, and the final was a success. And at the very end there was that terrible downpour at the awards ceremony (directly "Master and Margarita") and a lonely umbrella over the VIP-tribune.
The best job in the world
Remember, a few years ago in Australia they announced an international competition for the best job in the world? You had to live on a tropical island, feed giant tortoises and blog on the Internet. And get for it somewhere around 100 thousand dollars a year.
But I think that the best job in the world (in Moscow, for sure) belongs to those guys who mow the lawn at Luzhniki every morning.
Source: habr.com