If you've been to Denver International Airport lately, you might have noticed the brand-new tiling that's part of the Great Hall Project is cracked in many places, and some tiles are held together with nothing but tape.

Airport officials say some of the damage is from construction equipment rolling over the new flooring, and other tiles, they say, may have been cracked by train vibrations or the Zamboni cleaning machine.

But Patricia Watson, a construction management attorney, is convinced the problem is more serious, "It's actually cracked and failing everywhere," she says. "You can't walk through the airport and go 100 feet in any direction and not find grout falling or popping out."  

A frequent flyer, Watson first noticed scuff marks and scratches in the new flooring, "I think it was a terrible choice to put white tile in an airport with glitter in it. It looks filthy all the time."

But she says, a poor color choice is one thing, poor construction is another.

Watson is an attorney with nearly 30 years' experience in commercial real estate, including construction defect litigation. 

She says she's managed the construction of more than a million square feet of commercial office projects in Colorado and says whoever managed the tile installation in the airport's Great Hall botched the job. "It clearly didn't get adhered to the floor properly. There's definitely places where there's air under the tile. When somebody stands on that section, it doesn't have support under it, so it cracks the tile. And it's just going to get worse."

She says everywhere grout is missing, the tile will eventually crack, "I think there was poor construction supervision, or it would not look like this right now. I counted 100 places on the 5th floor just on this side where it's cracked."

Airport officials say they did their own count after CBS Colorado contacted them and found 266 cracked tiles out of just over 21,000 tiles installed on the 5th and 6th levels. That's about 1%, which they say is within industry standard.

They released a statement saying,  "The cracking can be caused by issues other than installation, which may include structural vibrations throughout the terminal from construction, train movement, passenger movement, foundation movement, cleaning equipment, maintenance equipment and other variables." Some of the damage, they say, is "due to heavy equipment and material deliveries, and replacement of these tiles was planned and budgeted with the program costs."

Once work is complete, they said the tiles will be replaced.  They insisted that "There are no product issues, warranty issues, or installer issues."

Officials say they didn't install the tiles at the end of the project because it's more efficient to replace individual tiles than rip out temporary flooring and install new flooring.

The tiles, they say, were imported from Italy and cost $242 per tile. They used "travel paths," they say, to minimize the cost of replacing them, and say their "contingency budget" will cover most of the costs, and repairs will not prolong the project.

Until those repairs happen, Watson says, the flooring fiasco will be the first impression visitors have of Denver, "Should be the pride and joy of our city, not something that's embarrassing when you walk through the airport and you see 150 cracked tiles."

Watson believes installers used the wrong type of grout, which she says could be the fault of the architect or the contractor. Airport officials say they recently changed to a different type of grout. They also say that, after an inspection by a third-party expert, they began videotaping the installation of every tile and have seen very few cracked tiles.

With 83 million travelers a year, they say that they're continually making repairs, noting the old granite floor also saw cracking, and they are currently repairing concourse floors.

The Great Hall project, which involves renovating the fifth and sixth levels of the terminal, began in 2018 and was supposed to be finished in 2021. The original $770 million price tag has nearly doubled to $1.3 billion.

In 2019, CBS Colorado was the first to report on problems with concrete. That increased costs by millions of dollars and put the project years behind schedule. The airport switched contractors and now says it will be finished in 2027.