On Friday, the AquaDom at the Berlin Radisson Blu hotel burst. At 50 feet tall, it was formerly the world’s largest cylindrical aquarium, home to 1,500 fish swimming in over a quarter million gallons of water. Now, it’s just a real mess in the lobby of an evacuated hotel, plus a whole lot of dead fish.
I find myself fascinated by this story. Thankfully, though a massive amount of water was unleashed, no one was killed. In fact, only two people were even injured in this huge, catastrophic event. It’s certainly awful luck for the former residents of the tank, but all that’s left to do is ruefully chuckle while contemplating the last thoughts of those confused fish. I think it’s sort of like if gravity gave out, and we just got sucked into the vacuum of space. What a trip that would be!
Now, I imagine that many of you are like me, and that you’d really like to see this mess as it unfolded. Alas, to this point, no footage of the actual destruction has been released. All the videos I’ve found simply show the aftermath.1 That’s a shame.
Until we see video proof otherwise, I think it’s safe to assume that it went down exactly like this:2
That poor waiter (who might’ve been an IMF agent?)
The cause of the incident in Berlin is still being investigated, and authorities reportedly don’t believe it was an intentional act. Me? I’m looking for a guy with explosive chewing gum.
Footnotes:
I did find a neat video showing the aquarium before it broke (archived here). There was an elevator in the middle!↩︎
This second video is archived here. ↩︎
