“It was unimaginable.” Guests of the Radisson Collection Hotel in Berlin are still in shock. At around 5:45 a.m. on Friday, the glass walls of the 16-meter-high AquaDom, the world’s largest cylindrical aquarium with a capacity of 1,000 m3 of water, gave way, triggering a “tsunami” of water. it devastated much of the hotel lobby.
The results of the spectacular incident, which caused two minor injuries, could have been heavier, due to the timing of the explosion. Nearly all of the 1,500 tropical fish were killed, a fire department spokesman said.
“It’s a real tsunami”
On Friday, the mayor of Berlin, Franziska Giffey, went to the scene of the accident. “It was a real tsunami that washed away the hotel grounds and the adjacent restaurants,” she lamented.
“Explosion”, “storm”, “earthquake”
“I heard a big explosion, a bit like the sound of fireworks, but the hotel walls were shaking,” said Claudia Gonzales, a hotel resident.
Other witnesses present in his hotel room at the time of the events speak, in particular in the German media RBBan “unimaginable” situation, the sound of a “storm” or even a “bomb attack”.
“I only heard a very loud crash and saw that the big aquarium was broken, a witness said ‘rbb’ this time, everything was destroyed. The bar where he was still sitting the day before no longer existed.
Sandra Weeser, a liberal member of the Bundestag, also slept there. At first, she thought of a “brief earthquake” and she went back to sleep, our colleagues from World.
Waking up, he discovered the extent of the damage: “It’s a picture of devastation with lots of dead fish and fragments. The hotel looks a bit like a war zone.”
A parrot fish frozen to the ground
An image struck the German parliamentarian: “one of those big parrot fish on the ground, completely frozen.” In fact, due to a winter cold snap, Berlin’s temperatures were negative early in the morning.
“Fish that could have been saved froze to death,” he added.
However, this Friday afternoon, the Berlin fire brigade announced on its Twitter account that “several dozen live fish could still be rescued from the top construction area of the burst aquarium.”
The causes of the incident are still unclear.
The company that owns AquaDom, Union Investment, said it was “destroyed by the disaster” whose origin remains “completely unclear”.
“The investigation, of course, has not finished, but the first elements point to the wear and tear of the equipment,” said the city’s Interior Minister, Iris Spranger, to local media.
However, the aquarium had been renovated and modernized in 2020 for €2.5 million. Inside, a glass elevator with transparent walls was built. It had been open to tourists since the summer of 2022.
Source: BFM TV
