A large aquarium and 1,500 fish explodes inside a hotel in Berlin

The AquaDom aquarium, a huge cylinder-shaped fish tank 16 meters high and 11.5 meters in diameter, blew up early this morning, devastating the reception of the Radisson Blue hotel in central Berlin. More than a million liters of water and 1,500 fish suddenly spilled out, taking everything in their path with them. The water destroyed glass and storefronts on the ground floor and flooded much of the street in the center of the city, leaving it strewn with debris and fish.

Miraculously, only two people were slightly injured by the pieces of glass that were shot when the giant fish tank exploded, the police in the German capital reported. The accident occurred at dawn, shortly before 6:00 in the morning, so the reception and the street of the hotel were practically empty. The construction, with a total height of 25 meters, allowed one to enter the aquarium and go down to its base in a glass elevator. The cylindrical aquarium was considered the largest free-standing one-piece fish tank in the world.

The detonation from the gigantic glass warehouse, standing six stories high, blew out windows and doors and hurled debris into the street. The large, heavy planters at the door of the hotel shot out onto the opposite sidewalk. “When an aquarium bursts, he does it suddenly,” explained one firefighter. His experts provisionally attribute the accident to a weariness of the aquarium’s construction materials, which had just been renovated and opened to the public last summer, after two and a half years of works at a cost of 2.6 million euros.

“We heard a loud explosion, which woke us up and scared us,” explained a hotel guest, who was evacuated from the building by firefighters along with the other 350 guests who were spending the night there. At midmorning they were able to return to their rooms. The police in turn proceeded to close the street, impassable for traffic as it was full of rubble and fish corpses. More than 1,500 fish of more than 100 species, including several sharks, housed the aquarium, whose explosion was recorded by two seismographs in the German capital dedicated to earthquake control.