The municipality announces: Here’s why there was massive chaos in the parking garage over the weekend

On Saturday afternoon, drivers in the parking basement under Friis Shopping Center in Aalborg experienced a traffic jam as they tried to exit the parking garage. The traffic light system only allowed 3-4 cars to exit at a time before the light turned red again.

Throughout Sunday, Aalborg Municipality investigated the cause of the malfunction in the signal system at Friis over the weekend.

It has now been revealed that it was a human error.

“We had a conversation on Monday afternoon with the Center Manager at Friis, Niels Adolfsen, who informed us that he had asked an employee at Friis Shopping Center to go down and change the signal program.

Friis has a key so they can manually change the program following a manual.

Unfortunately, the employee made an operational error, causing the signal system to run the wrong program, which had the opposite effect and prioritized the entrance instead of the exit from the parking facility,” the municipality writes in a press release.

Mette Skamris Holm, the head of the City and Land Department, explains:

“There is a logbook kept for the activities on the signal system. From the log, we can now see that it was a regrettable human error, not a technical fault.

The previous errors that have occurred on the system – and which have been mentioned in the media – were of a technical nature, caused by program settings.

These issues have been corrected and can no longer occur.”

“According to our log on the signal system, it shows that a person with a key was in the control cabinet at Friis and manually changed the program at 14:07 on Saturday afternoon. Aalborg Municipality was contacted by North Jutland Police at 17:00 on Saturday afternoon, and we immediately called in a technician who had the signal program back on track by 17:13.”

“Already tomorrow, we have a meeting with Friis, where we will discuss the next steps to minimize the risk of a similar incident happening again,” concludes Mette Skamris Holm.