A giant aquarium in a Berlin hotel containing a million liters of water and 1,500 tropical fish exploded Friday morning, causing destruction on a grand scale.
Sandra Weeser, a German MP from the liberal Free Democrats party, was a guest in the Radisson Blu hotel this week as Bundestag members gathered in Berlin for the last parliamentary week of the year.
But her last day didn’t start as planned. “I woke up from a big bang, thinking it was an earthquake,” Weeser told POLITICO. She only found out through social media what had really happened after the monstrous explosion shook the building, before she was evacuated by the fire department as water flooded the hotel and nearby streets.“There was wreckage everywhere — and the poor tropical fish frozen in between,” she said, describing the “sad picture” on the hotel’s ground floor, where the water was ankle-deep as firemen escorted her out of the building.
“One of the big fish — a parrotfish — was lying frozen on the floor on my way out,” she told Berliner Morgenpost in an earlier interview.
There wasn’t even a sole survivor of the explosion. All 1,500 fish that lived in the 16-meter-high acrylic tank died and had to be disposed of, a fire department spokesman said.
The hotel, which usually had a “pleasant ambience” according to Weeser, was left “all dark and wet,” she said.
Thankfully, Weeser said, the incident happened when the often-busy ground floor was largely deserted at 5:45 a.m. Four hundred hotel guests were evacuated. Two people were taken to the hospital with Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey also highlighted the “great luck that no terrible human damage happened,” while she called the flooding “a veritable tsunami.”
The cause of the disaster remains unclear. However, the Berlin police said that there are “no indications of a criminal act.”
A “sad end of the year,” Weeser concluded, hoping she can be a guest in the hotel next year again. Source
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