Enlarge image
Clean-up work on Friday: More than 200 rescue workers on duty
Photo: MICHELE TANTUSSI / REUTERS
Only small puddles, which quickly froze over when the temperature was below zero, bear witness to the masses of water that poured onto Karl-Liebknecht-Straße on Friday morning.
At noon, an orange clearing vehicle pushes together destroyed seating, box trees and flower pots - things that a few hours earlier adorned the lobby of the Radisson Blu Hotel.
At this point, photos and videos from inside the building show that it is just a field of rubble.
The Aquadom burst early in the morning, a huge glass cylinder with an elevator in the middle.
A million liters of water poured into the ground floor and onto the street.
Two people were slightly injured, probably hit by debris.
Almost all of the 1,500 fish in the aquarium are dead. Only in the afternoon do the fire brigade find some living animals and bring them to safety.
The Aquadom is said to have been the “largest free-standing cylindrical aquarium in the world”.
The attention is correspondingly high, far beyond Berlin and Germany.
The New York Times and the BBC report, Le Parisien and Aj Jazeera.
Berlin's Governing Mayor Franziska Giffey (SPD) drives to the scene of the accident around eleven o'clock and goes into the building with emergency services.
“This is incredible destruction.
It looks like after a tsunami.
If there had been people, we would have had to mourn umpteen deaths today," she told SPIEGEL afterwards.
"People wouldn't have had a chance."
When the gigantic aquarium burst, there were around 400 people in the hotel, including guests and employees.
“It sounded like there was a subway right below our floor,” says Chris Woolley.
A look out of his window on the third floor showed the completely destroyed aquarium.
"There were huge shards of glass in the hotel lobby, and water was pouring out of pipes." He also saw a few fish thrashing about, "but not too many and not big ones."
Paul Maletzke describes it similarly.
"It was an explosive bang, it looked really violent," says the Rostocker.
"At first I thought there was something in the building, a car or an airplane or something."
Giffey also felt reminded of other disaster reports, such as the amok drive in the summer or the major fire in Grunewald.
"These are absolutely extraordinary events that never actually happen."
As a spokesman said, the fire department turned off the electricity in the building to prevent electric shocks in flooded basement areas.
The water supply was also turned off so that no additional water could escape through destroyed pipes.
With a team of dogs, first responders searched the ground floor of the hotel for people who had been buried.
Apparently no one was missing by late afternoon.
The 300 guests who were still in the hotel in the morning were taken to other accommodations.
Experts from the Federal Agency for Technical Relief check whether the building is stable.
The suddenly escaping water may have damaged the house so badly that it has to be supported.
Exhibits from the DDR Museum could also have been damaged.
The museum is housed in the same building as the hotel.
The museum has so far left a request from SPIEGEL unanswered.
The investigation into the cause of the accident is still in its infancy.
Berlin's interior senator spoke in the morning that material fatigue could have been the cause of the bursting of the aquarium.
The first indications were that this was the case.
Who is responsible for the aquarium, which only reopened in the summer after more than two years of renovation?
Sea Life operates a large theme world in the affected hotel building.
A visit to the Aquadom could be booked on the company's website.
However, the GmbH distanced itself in a statement: It is not the owner, and "maintenance and care" is not in the hands of Sea Life Berlin.
The company is currently trying to get more information from the owners of the Aquadom.
This is the company Union Investment, which holds the "DomAquarée", which houses the hotel and the various aquariums as well as the GDR museum, offices and apartments, in the form of a real estate fund.
"We are on site and are checking how to proceed," said a spokesman.
“We regret the death of the fish in the aquarium.
Rescue measures are currently taking place in the smaller aquariums.«
Around 400 to 500 smaller fish are to be brought to safety from the aquariums under the lobby, for example in the underwater world "Sea Life".
These animals were also in danger because the aquariums were not supplied with electricity - which is necessary for the oxygen supply, as Almut Neumann explained.
The animal rights organization Peta generally criticized the keeping of fish on the occasion of the incident: "This man-made tragedy shows that aquariums are not a safe place for fish and other marine animals." She calls for the Aquadom not to be rebuilt.
And she demands a memorial for the fish that were washed to their deaths from the huge aquarium.
With material from dpa