Sea Life’s own aquarium is located in the same building and visitors can tour it and the AquaDom on a single ticket. Various organisations, including the Berlin Zoo, offered to take in the surviving fish.Īquarium operator Sea Life said it was saddened by the incident and was trying to get more information about the incident from the owners of the AquaDom. “Now it’s about evacuating them quickly,” Almut Neumann, a city official in charge of environmental issues for Berlin’s Mitte district, told German news agency DPA. Without electricity, their tanks were not receiving the necessary oxygen for them to survive, officials said. “Unfortunately, none of the 1,500 fish could be saved,” Giffey said.Įfforts were being made to save an additional 400 to 500 smaller fish housed in aquariums underneath the hotel lobby. A view shows the AquaDom after it burst in this still image obtained from a social media video Īmong the 80 types of fish, it housed were blue tang and clownfish, two colourful species known from the popular animated movie “Finding Nemo”. The 25-metre-tall (82-feet-tall) AquaDom was described as the world’s largest cylindrical tank and held more than a thousand tropical fish before the incident. “We would have had terrible human damage” had the aquarium burst even an hour later, once more people were awake and in the hotel and the surrounding area, Giffey said. “Despite all the destruction, we were still very lucky,” she said. Mayor Franziska Giffey said the incident unleashed a “veritable tsunami” of water, but the early morning timing prevented far more injuries. Police said parts of the building, which also contains a hotel, cafes and a chocolate store, were damaged on Friday morning as 1 million litres (264,000 gallons) of water poured from the aquarium shortly before 6am (05:00 GMT).īerlin’s fire service said two people were slightly injured. Berlin’s zoo has offered to take in any surviving fish from the hotel complex.A huge aquarium in Berlin has burst, spilling debris, water and hundreds of tropical fish out of the AquaDom tourist attraction in the heart of the German capital. 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.įurther 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. One of the highlights of the attraction was a 10-minute elevator ride through the tank, which would have taken place at 10am. Operators said the aquarium was the biggest cylindrical tank in the world, containing 1,500 tropical fish of 80 different species before the incident. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. 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.Įarlier 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. “Investigations are of course not yet complete, but first signs suggest we are dealing with material fatigue,” Iris Spranger told the DPA news agency.įirst opened in 2003, the aquarium was overhauled as recently as 2020. Material fatigue was the likeliest cause of the incident, Berlin’s interior minister said on Friday afternoon. The neighbouring DDR Museum, which depicts life in the former East Germany, sustained water damage during the incident, police confirmed. ![]() ![]() The road as well as the pavements outside the complex were littered with debris. “If the whole thing had happened an hour later, we would have had to report terrible human damage.”Įmergency 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. “A proper tsunami poured forth over the premises of the hotel and adjacent restaurants,” she said. “I thought it was an earthquake.”īerlin’s mayor, Franziska Giffey, visited the scene. “Our whole bed was shaking,” another guest told the Tagesspiegel newspaper.
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