The AquaDom, which stood inside the Radisson hotel, was described as the largest freestanding cylindrical aquarium in the world. It was home to more than 1,500 tropical fish. An elevator ride through the 82-foot-tall tropical tank was a popular attraction, and took 10 minutes to complete. [...]
The cause of the watery explosion remains unknown, with some speculation that freezing overnight temperatures in Berlin -- hitting 14 degrees Fahrenheit -- might have caused cracks in the acrylic tank, which burst under the weight of the water.
Fish jailbreak goes poorly
One million liters of water crashed out of the aquarium. Two people were injured by the exploding glass and debris, but none were found trapped beneath the rubble. The fish did not survive.
Tags: doomed, mutants
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14 Responses:
this is so sad.
FYI from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63996982 - "However, fire brigade official James Klein later told local media that "several dozen" fish had been found alive in places where residual water had collected. He said they were being rehoused in other aquariums.
Also, the Associated Press quoted officials as saying they were working to rescue another 400-500 fish in smaller tanks under the hotel lobby which had been deprived of oxygen because of the disaster."
I find it unfathomable that anyone agreed to insure that thing.
I see what you did there. But I'm still not sure it was on porpoise.
It would be really uh... "interesting" if something like this happened at that Vegas hotel where you can swim right next to the sharks.
Journalists sure hype big numbers. Let's see, for the tank size, picture a "short course" (half-size) Olympic swimming pool, 25 m (82 ft – surprise!) long, 20 m (60 ft) wide and 2 m (6.5 ft) deep, and now stand it up length-wise. There's your 1 million Liters = 1000 m³, which volume of water has a mass of, well, 1000 metric tons. No wonder that even the fraction of this that made it across the hotel lobby still blew out the doors across several street lanes.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium Kelp Forest tank (blip in Star Trek IV, which I confess inspired me to go visit) is 28 ft (8.5 m) tall and has flat seamless plexiglass panels that they are very proud of, and those are supported by structural frames. Looks like for that Berlin aquarium the wall was all-plexiglass, concave face to the water. I'd love to see the forensic engineering report.
The inner cylinder was convex to the water which is potentially nastier (less stable, and I bet if the inner cylinder failed abruptly the shock would cause the outer one to fail). But it looks like either both or at least the outer cylinder had joints in it, so I bet one of them failed possibly due to thermal issues (people are saying it was unusually cold though the quoted temperatures don't sound extreme ... but I don't live in Berlin).
So I think it's the usual thing: if it's unusually cold do not launch spacecraft or go near giant tanks of water.
Both inner and outer cylinder were built in separate pieces and assembled ("bond" or "(solvent) weld" would be the term here, but don't quote me on that). The literature availabe to the layman says that when using the right kind of acrylic and not mis-treating it, it should withstand aging quite well. And the whoile thing was an indoor installation, so it shouldn't have been exposed to freezing temperatures?
I'm mostly working on the intuition that, if it's going to fail, joints are where it's going to fail: there's a reason people spend absurd amounts of time x-raying welds in nuclear powerplants, for instance.
There's the description on the website of the manufacturer of that tank: https://www.reynoldspolymer.com/projects/aquadom/ with some more images for seeing the scale of the cylinder. I really hope the final report on this will be made public.
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I read that some fish were rescued, thank the lord!
Having lived in Berlin since ever, I always thought that some day I‘d go see that aquarium. Guess not anymore. 😅
For the fish it must've felt like a false vacuum decay. A sudden unexplained and unforeseeable state change that destroyed their universe and replaced it with a completely uninhabitable one.
According to a marine biologist interviewed by a local news magazine, it was a real MULTIKILL:
1. Some of the fish may have already been killed by the shock of the loud bang when the aquarium burst.
2. The sudden loss of pressure probably killed most of them.
3. The drop in temperature probably caused the death of the rest of the fish: the water was about 26 degrees Celsius warm, most of those fish would not survive less than 20 degrees. Inside the hall itself it was maybe 18-20 degrees before all the windows broke, but outside it was -4 degrees.
4. Those fish that were not lucky (?) enough to land in a puddle naturally suffocated due to water loss.
5. IF any of the fish survived all this and got washed out into the street and down the sewer, they would have suffered a fatal loss of electrolytes: The aquarium contained salt water, but the sewer does not.
(The hundreds of fish that were rescued were not in the main aquarium. They were in smaller aquariums in the basement for breeding. They were in danger because their life support systems stopped working due to the accident.)
Surprised video hasn't leaked of the moment of the fish apocalypse.