A freestanding cylindrical aquarium housing about 1,500 exotic fish burst in Berlin on Friday morning, causing a wave of devastation in and around the tourist attraction.
Glass, chairs, tables and other debris were swept out of the DomAquarée complex, which includes a Radisson hotel, a museum, shops and restaurants, as 1m litres of water poured out of the 14-metre-high (46ft) tank shortly before 6am.
Police said two people sustained injuries from falling shards of glass and had to be taken to hospital. None of the animals inside the saltwater aquarium, which contained clownfish, teira batfish and palette surgeonfish, survived.
One witness, Gwendolin Szyszkowitz, told the German news channel n-tv she heard a loud bang and feared a bomb had exploded.
“Our whole bed was shaking,” another guest told the Tagesspiegel newspaper. “I thought it was an earthquake.”
Berlin’s mayor, Franziska Giffey, visited the scene. “A proper tsunami poured forth over the premises of the hotel and adjacent restaurants,” she said. “If the whole thing had happened an hour later, we would have had to report terrible human damage.”
Emergency services shut an adjacent major road that leads from Alexanderplatz toward the Brandenburg Gate owing to the large volume of water that had flooded out of the building.
The road as well as the pavements outside the complex were littered with debris. The neighbouring DDR Museum, which depicts life in the former East Germany, sustained water damage during the incident, police confirmed.
Material fatigue was the likeliest cause of the incident, Berlin’s interior minister said on Friday afternoon. “Investigations are of course not yet complete, but first signs suggest we are dealing with material fatigue,” Iris Spranger told the DPA news agency.
First opened in 2003, the aquarium was overhauled as recently as 2020. A spokesperson for the company that owns the structure said additional insulation was added and the glass cylinder polished as part of the maintenance works.
Earlier in the day, there had been speculation that overnight temperatures of as low as -10C (14F) had caused a crack in the glass, which is 18cm (7in) thick at the top and 22cm at the bottom of the cylindrical structure.
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Operators said the aquarium was the biggest cylindrical tank in the world, containing 1,500 tropical fish of 80 different species before the incident. One of the highlights of the attraction was a 10-minute elevator ride through the tank, which would have taken place at 10am.
On Friday morning, buses were sent to the complex to provide shelter for the 350 hotel guests who had been asked to evacuate the building.
Further aquariums in the building’s basement, containing between about 400 and 500 smaller fish, were not directly damaged by the incident but were without electricity on Friday afternoon. Berlin’s zoo has offered to take in any surviving fish from the hotel complex.
Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report