The water from the 16 meter high cylindrical aquarium swept away the reception of a hotel
The AquaDom aquarium, a huge cylindrical aquarium measuring 16 meters high and 11.5 meters in diameter, exploded early this morning, destroying the reception area of the Radisson Blue hotel in central Berlin. More than a million liters of water and 1,500 fish suddenly poured out, taking everything in their path with them. The water destroyed glass and storefronts on the ground floor and flooded much of the downtown street, leaving it littered with debris and fish.
Miraculously, only two people were slightly injured by the glass shards that were shot when the gigantic aquarium exploded, the police in the German capital reported. The accident happened at dawn, shortly before 6:00 AM, leaving the hotel’s reception and street virtually empty. The construction, with a total height of 25 meters, made it possible to enter the aquarium and go down in a glass elevator. The cylindrical aquarium was considered to be the largest one-piece freestanding aquarium in the world.
The blast from the giant glass warehouse, which was 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, it suddenly bursts,” explains a firefighter. The experts tentatively attribute the accident to a fatigue of the building materials of the aquarium, which had just been renovated last summer and opened to the public after two and a half years of work at a cost of 2.6 million euros.
“We heard a loud explosion, which woke us up and scared us,” explains a hotel guest, who was evacuated from the building by the fire brigade, along with the other 350 guests who spent the night there. By mid-morning they were able to return to their rooms. The police in turn closed the street, which was impassable to traffic because it was full of rubble and fish carcasses. More than 1,500 fish from more than 100 species, including several sharks, were in the aquarium, the explosion of which was recorded by two seismographs in the German capital, dedicated to earthquake control.
Source: La Verdad
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