The aquarium explosion injured at least two people. The fish are all dead.
A “huge explosion“, trembling walls and water everywhere: a giant aquarium burst Friday, December 16 in a prestigious hotel in Berlin devastating the entire lobby and injuring two.
The AquaDom, a structure some fifteen meters high, presents itself on its website as “the largest cylindrical aquarium in the world“. Its glass walls shattered around 5:50 a.m. local time (4:50 a.m. GMT), according to police and firefighters, shaking central Berlin.
Nothing remains of the huge tank that held over a million liters of water and some 1,500 tropical fish. It was enthroned in the lobby of the Radisson Collection hotel, in the tourist district of the Cathedral and the island of museums.
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“I heard a huge explosion, kinda like the sound of fireworks, but the hotel walls shook“, testifies a resident Claudia Gonzales. In addition to having causedincredible marine damage“, the incident caused two minor injuries, hit by shrapnel, who were transported to hospital.
“Everything was devastated”
The aquarium was equipped with a glass elevator allowing visitors to observe marine life from the inside. “Water and fish spilled downstairs“, then on the adjacent streets, carrying in the passage of a lot of debris, indicated a spokesperson for the firefighters to AFP.
The hotel was gradually evacuated, and it was then that most of the approximately 300 residents could really measure the extent of the damage. In front of the gutted entrance to the establishment, broken objects lay in the morning on the frozen ground, AFP journalists noted.
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Sabine Andersch’s room was on the third floor, and up there everything worked normally, she said. But “when we went down the stairs, there was water everywhere, debris, torn doors. It was impressive“, she confides.
“It was unimaginable, like there was a bomb attacksays another resident, Andreas Schmidt. “Everything was devastated. The bar where I was still sitting the day before no longer existedhe says. “Lucky it happened so early in the morning and not when the bar is open“, he notes.
If the incident had happened an hour later, we probably would have had to lament “terrible loss of lifesaid Franziska Giffey, the mayor of Berlin. The 1,500 fish could not be saved, she said.
frozen parrot fish
Liberal MP Sandra Weeser, who was spending the night at the hotel, said she first thought it was an earthquake. While evacuating the hotel, she found that the area where the aquarium was had become “dark and damp“, she told the daily Berliner Morgenpost, adding to have seen”one of those big parrotfish on the ground, completely frozenas the capital goes through a winter cold spell with sub-zero temperatures.
It is now a question of determining the causes of the incident. The aquarium was not the victim of a simple crack, “he burst“, said the spokesperson for the fire department. According to the popular newspaper Picture, the explosion would have been caused by material wear. The AquaDom had however been reopened last summer after a long and costly renovation of 2.5 million euros, recalls the newspaper.
The Sea Life aquarium complex, located nearby and usually visited at the same time as the AquaDom, “will remain closed until further notice“said Marcel Kloos, regional director of its parent company, Merlin Entertainments. The GDR museum, close to the site and built underground, was partly flooded and will probably be closed until the end of February, its director Gordon Godin told the Berliner Kurier, adding that around “30% of the exhibition surface is destroyed“.