The 25 meter high “AquaDom” of the Radisson Collection Hotel collapsed in the night from Thursday to Friday in the center of the German capital and spilled almost a million liters of water.
A breathtaking sight. A “very strong detonation” surprised the approximately 350 people present in the hotel and in the shopping mall of the Radisson Blu Hotel on Karl-Liebknech-Strasse in Berlin this Friday morning at around 5:45 a.m., the local police said.
The reason: the explosion of a cylindrical aquarium with a capacity of 1000 m3 installed in the lobby of this hotel in the city center of the German capital. Around 100 emergency services from the fire brigade and police were deployed. Parts of the hotel facade were smashed in the street.
“The aquarium is damaged and leaking,” said the fire department on Twitter.
“Huge Sea Damage”
The blast woke hotel guests early in the morning, and the sight of the devastation drew widespread comment on social media.
“What the heck is this, my hotel aquarium just exploded in the middle of the night. What’s up?” one customer wrote on Twitter, filming the remains of the structure in the building’s lobby.
The tube is presented by the Portal news agency as the world’s largest free-standing cylindrical aquarium.
“In addition to the enormous sea damage (…) two people were injured by glass splinters” and transported to the hospital, the city police said on Twitter. For their part, the Berlin fire brigade announced that the rescuers could not yet get to the ground floor of the building because of the debris.
Search dogs were sent to the scene of the accident to rescue all victims of the disaster. Rescue did not say if any of the 1,500 tropical fish in the aquarium had been rescued.
“A Picture of Desolation”
“Everything inside is destroyed. There are dead fish. All the furniture and windows are destroyed. Shards everywhere,” said tourists from the hotel in the world. The hotel looks “a bit like a war zone,” said Bundestag member Sandra Weeser, who slept there.
“It’s a picture of devastation with lots of dead fish and broken pieces. The fish that could have been saved are frozen to death,” she added, as temperatures in the German capital fell well below freezing overnight.
The reasons for the explosion of the building are not yet known. The aquarium was modernized in 2020 and a clear-walled glass elevator was installed inside. It has been open to tourists since the summer of 2022. The explosion would have been caused by equipment wear and tear, predicts the German daily Bild.
Structural engineers checked this Friday morning to see if the building’s structural members had been damaged by the pool’s explosion, while the effects of the fall are visible on seismograms from the city’s stations.
Hotel guests were asked to pack their bags and leave the house. Buses were chartered to pick them up and escort them to other facilities.
Karl-Liebknech-Strasse, where the hotel is located in the Mitte district and which leads to Alexanderplatz and the Brandenburg Gate, has been closed to traffic. “There is a lot of water on the road,” said the municipal transport company. The hotel also includes a complex of shops and restaurants, as well as a museum.
Maxime Le Roux at Portal