Un aquarium 25 meters high and 1,000 cubic meters in capacity. The AquaDom, “the largest cylindrical aquarium in the world”, exploded on Friday in the middle of the shopping arcade at the Raiddon Blu hotel in central Berlin. Its glass walls shattered around 5:50 a.m. local time, according to police and firefighters, shaking the center of the German capital. One million liters of water spilled out, and two people were injured by broken glass from the explosion. Part of the hotel’s facade was shattered, and more than 100 firefighters rushed to the scene.
Nothing remains of the huge tank that held over a million liters of water and some 1,500 tropical fish. The aquarium sat in the lobby of the Radisson Blu hotel, in the tourist district of the cathedral and Museum Island. “I heard a huge explosion, a bit like the sound of fireworks, but the walls of the hotel shook,” said resident Claudia Gonzales. In addition to causing “incredible marine damage”, the incident caused two minor injuries, hit by shrapnel, who were taken to hospital.
Hotel residents evacuated
“The water and the fish spread on the ground floor”, then on the adjacent streets, carrying a lot of debris along the way, a spokesman for the firefighters told Agence France-Presse. 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.
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 says. “It was unimaginable, as if there had been a bomb attack,” says another resident, Andreas Schmidt. “Everything was devastated. The bar where I was still sitting the day before no longer existed,” he said. “Lucky that it happened so early in the morning and not at times when the bar is open,” he notes.
If the incident had happened an hour later, we would probably have had to deplore “terrible human losses”, said Franziska Giffey, the mayor of Berlin. The 1,500 fish themselves could not be saved, she said.
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The reasons for the incident still unknown
It is now for the investigators to determine the causes of the incident. The aquarium was not the victim of a simple crack, “it burst”, specified the spokesman of the firefighters. 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”.