At least two people were injured Friday in the center of Berlin when the AquaDom aquarium, one of the largest in the world with a capacity of one million liters of water, burst early this morning inside the luxury hotel DomAquarée, where it was installed.
The explosion of the aquarium – a huge water cylinder 16 meters high, standing in the center of the lobby – has generated a torrent of water has taken ahead staff, customers and hotel furniture, and flooded the Karl-Liebknecht street, one of the busiest in the center of the German capital, closed for hours to the passage of vehicles, as reported by the Berlin Traffic Headquarters on its Twitter account.
The two injured have been hospitalized with a reserved prognosis, as confirmed by the emergency services, according to sources of the DPA agency, while more than a hundred firefighters have already begun the debris removal work.
The bursting has expelled to the street the 1,500 fish that contained the aquarium, many of which have ended up dragged by the torrent of water to the sewers of Berlin.
The police have confirmed that there are no indications that the bursting was the result of a deliberate act and the fire department is already putting the incident down to a possible maintenance or construction fault.
«We are not talking about a leak caused by a crack. The aquarium has burst, and that is a manufacturing defect,» a spokesman said.
According to sources in the German newspaper ‘Bild’, the explosion was caused by wear and tear on the equipment. However, the AquaDom had reopened last summer after a long and costly renovation estimated at 2.5 million euros.
