Cylindrical aquarium housing 1,500 exotic fish bursts in Berlin

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/16/huge-cylindrical-aquarium-housing-1500-exotic-fish-bursts-in-berlin

by patrickdet • 4 years ago

264 253 4 years ago

Fricken2• 4 years ago

Weird. Earlier today I awoke from a nap after strange dreams and attempted to produce images in midjourney of a giant aquarium breaking. I must psychic or something.

zython• 4 years ago

Please dream of me winning the lottery and or becoming 10x dev.

PainfullyNormal• 4 years ago

Win the lottery and become a 10x dev and maybe he'll dream about it.

koonsolo• 4 years ago

You do realise that becoming a 10x dev will mean you're getting underpaid? It's better to become a 0.1x developer so you're sure you're getting the better end of the deal ;).

Traubenfuchs• 4 years ago

Why would you ever want to become a 10x dev instead of winning the lottery?

passwordoops2• 4 years ago

Shit happens with my wife All. The. Time.

We're rational enough to mostly chalk it up to coincidence or selection bias, but not calculating enough to take advantage of gullible people

(Edited to mention selection bias)

pauletienney• 4 years ago

For pure curiosity, could you give us some examples of what happen with your wife? Thx

blueflow• 4 years ago

You can chalk it up to selection bias, you never remember the predictions that were just garbage.

namero999• 4 years ago

Interesting. I'm not sure chalking up an observation is the rational approach. I'd be looking into the Pauli-Jung conjecture before doing so.

Fricken2• 4 years ago

It's Midjourney. It has me wandering the uncanny valley for hours every day, there is so much undiscovered country. My sleep is disrupted. I'm in an altered state and I'm more tuned to recognizing coincidences and generally making associations between images that may or may not be floating around in the latent space.

pvaldes13• 4 years ago

Again sleeping with the TV news channel turned on?

cardiffspaceman• 4 years ago

In my reading I have read of several such occurrences, and experienced one myself. On 2 Feb 1990 I fell asleep in front of the TV and dreamed I was a journalist in Cape Town, South Africa. There was buzz about a possible speech by F.W. de Klerk in front of Parliament. I was concerned that I needed a snack on the way, and hoped that the gov't would provide donuts. Then I woke up and CNN was nagging me that de Klerk was about to address Parliament. The subject was South Africa transitioning out of apartheid.

jl6• 4 years ago

Wow, how do you make pieces of glass that size?

__alexs• 4 years ago

I think they are acrylic, not glass.

MengerSponge3• 4 years ago

Correct. https://www.bestpub.com/books/product/cid-151.html

rjzzleep• 4 years ago

It looks to me as if they're actually a lot of smaller pieces put together, but maybe I see it incorrectly. Maybe one day, architects will stop designing things that are structural liabilities, or engineers actually get to say no to it before construction starts.

mirekrusin• 4 years ago

They could make it from concrete.

ArchitectAnon2• 4 years ago

Incredibly unlikely for any part of the structure to have been designed by an architect, most likely a highly specialist subcontractor design item. Our insurance would not cover it and it is illegal for architects to practice without insurance in many EU countries. The closest any architect would get to this is to go to a big fish tank company and say I want a big fish tank with diameter x and height y, can you do it and how much will it be...

jacquesm28• 4 years ago

I don't understand your comment. Architects did not design this fishtank, engineers did, ones that specialize in such constructions. Whether or not the design was at fault or there were construction or maintenance issues or the tank was modified out-of-spec, whether there was damage due to the recent renovations are all open questions.

Structural engineers take their work very seriously, much more seriously than your typical software person and you can bet that any and all lessons learned from this incident will be incorporated into future designs. They don't just slap stuff together for the laughs and call it a day.

imhoguy• 4 years ago

They should use transparent aluminium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_materials#...

Reason0773• 4 years ago

Modern sapphire glass (Al₂O₃) is basically transparent aluminium, and it is very strong. Probably way too expensive to make an aquarium out of it, though!

Cthulhu_3• 4 years ago

"list of Star Trek materials"?

Slartie2• 4 years ago

It was manufactured in 2004 by a US company, "International Concept Management": https://icm-corp.com/

(side note: what a weird name for an aquarium manufacturing and design company)

durnygbur4• 4 years ago

uuuups... they better lawyer up...

Eduard2• 4 years ago

According to https://www.newlift.de/details-referenzen/aquadom.html , several companies were involved. Reynolds Polymer Technology, Inc. provided the acrylic windows: https://www.reynoldspolymer.com/projects/aquadom/ .

ICM has already removed AquaDom from their portfolio page https://icm-corp.com/portfolio/ , but a cached version (for now at least) exists at https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XGSNC7... .

PurpleRamen2• 4 years ago

Where do you have the year from? The aquarium was opened 2003 after several years of building. And seeing it now, two weeks ago it even had its 19th "birthday". Speak about bad timing.

01acheru• 4 years ago

IMHO there should be a DE/German tag in the title.

edit: title has been edited since this comment

WitCanStain• 4 years ago

Sadly I don't read German, was anyone injured?

beanjuice• 4 years ago

2 people, 1500 fish

whatsthatabout• 4 years ago

2 people got injured and mostly all fish are dead...

lynx232• 4 years ago

Humans are horrible creatures.

lqet4• 4 years ago

Previous thread, with link to article in English:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34012469

Before: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/image/sz.1.5716681/1280x720

After: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/image/sz.1.5716703/860x1290

It seems like the inner glass (for the elevator shaft) is still intact.

jacquesm28• 4 years ago

What a pity, it looks amazing.

raydiatian• 4 years ago

“So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

— This Aquarium, probably

mid-kid• 4 years ago

Came here for this reply

wyuenho5• 4 years ago

From the guidelines:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

HN really needs a European mod to maintain the quality of this board.

iamben• 4 years ago

There's an engineering angle here that I think a lot of us probably find interesting?

wyuenho5• 4 years ago

I guarantee you car crashes has more engineering angles than this. There's not even a post-mortem here.

thom2• 4 years ago

I think large-scale engineering failures in other disciplines are always of interest here.

wyuenho5• 4 years ago

It's interesting only if there's a detailed report on the reasons. Otherwise this piece is news is just a "oh", instead of a "a-ha".

bombcar10• 4 years ago

I mean as long as we're quoting (and breaking) the guidelines:

Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

(someone flag me, I can't flag myself)

defrost• 4 years ago

Link to English article:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/16/huge-cylindric...

A freestanding cylindrical aquarium housing about 1,500 exotic fish has burst in Berlin, causing a wave of devastation in and around the Sea Life tourist attraction, police have said.
Glass and other debris were swept out of the DomAquarée complex, which houses a Radisson hotel, a museum, shops and restaurants, as 1m litres of water poured out of the 14-metre-high tank shortly before 6am.
Operators say the aquarium has the biggest cylindrical tank in the world that contained 1,500 tropical fish of 80 different species before the incident.
The aquarium, which was last upgraded in 2020, is a big tourist attraction in Berlin. A 10-minute elevator ride through the tank was one of the highlights of the attraction.

TeMPOraL2• 4 years ago

14-metre-high tank
10-minute elevator ride through the tank

That's 1.4 meters per minute, or ~2.3 centimeters per second. The aquarium and the fish in it must have been marvelous to watch, because otherwise even imagining being stuck in an elevator moving at this pace feels terrifyingly boring to think about.

slickrick216• 4 years ago

Yeah it was quite nice. They’d feed the fish too and they’d all scramble for it.

Cthulhu_3• 4 years ago

It's a tourist attraction as part of the aquarium, not a tool to get from A to B; the hotel had its own regular elevator.

ceejayoz• 4 years ago

You've never sat on a bench for 10 minutes to look at something neat? They move even slower.

Ekaros• 4 years ago

That is lot of water. A thousand tonnes. It could do lot worse.

userbinator• 4 years ago

Imagining a 10m cube gives a good idea of the amount.

WhackyIdeas4• 4 years ago

Those fish must have taken a battering

jacquesm28• 4 years ago

Any fish that got flushed out will be lost, they need things to be 'just so'. I once helped clean up at a friends place who had 30 aquariums with thousands of fish after the power went out longer than his UPS could provide it. The mess was sickening. He never had another tank after that and it was his life's passion.

hardlianotion2• 4 years ago

It feels in this case that a lot of fish were killed for no reason at all. I am surprised at how much this annoys me.

yreg• 4 years ago

For how much longer than his UPS could provide it?

ThePadawan• 4 years ago

That's the UK you're thinking of, not Germany.

durnygbur4• 4 years ago

Now radisson will have to discount the room prices, once main attraction is gone...

chasd00• 4 years ago

I bet it stinks for months too

robotnikman• 4 years ago

I can only imagine the smell. I remember once having a small aquarium as a kid and it had that 'fishy' smell to it. The whole place must smell like that now.

MengerSponge3• 4 years ago

If you're curious about the design considerations and construction techniques for large aquaria, the standard reference is Stachiw's Handbook of Acrylics for Submersibles, Hyperbaric Chambers, and Aquaria: https://www.bestpub.com/books/product/cid-151.html

Plastics are weird, and examining the wreckage will give a lot of information about the failure mode.

jacquesm28• 4 years ago

A column of water that tall is nothing to mess around with. Even the smallest imperfection in the base materials can become a problem.

MengerSponge3• 4 years ago

170.65 kPa, or 24.75 psi. I imagine even Flex Tape can't hold that!

artemonster• 4 years ago

How do they make such a huge cylinder?

jacquesm28• 4 years ago

Take a large sheet of acrylic, warm it, bend it by warming it and applying pressure. If the circumference is large take multiple ones. Glue ends together, glue in base plug.

feb• 4 years ago

According to a german news report [1], it could be due to material fatigue.

[1] https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2022/12/berlin-karl-li...

usrusr• 4 years ago

If it's due to material fatigue it's due to engineering failure. That in turn may or may not be due to the yes-men promotion mechanism.

Eduard2• 4 years ago

yes-men promotion mechanism

huh?

PurpleRamen2• 4 years ago

The tank was around 20 Years old. How is material fatigue an engineering failure at that age?

ChuckNorris894• 4 years ago

Fatigue from what? It's a stationary object housed indoors, not a car or plane that goes through several climatical, temperature and environmental changes to cause fatigue.

Unless they were subjecting the tank to draining and filling cycles often, it seems more like a design/build fault that was a ticking time bomb from the start.

Mikeb85• 4 years ago

The fact an object is stationary doesn't mean forces aren't continuously being applied... Same goes for bridges and every load bearing object.

jacquesm28• 4 years ago

Thermal cycling is one option.

rzzzt• 4 years ago

Buildings move.

sidlls2• 4 years ago

Settlement of the building it's housed in, temperature variations (things contract and expand as temperature changes), random impacts and vibrations (e.g., road traffic, heavy construction nearby), and so on. All of these contribute to fatigue.

fwungy5• 4 years ago

Building temperatures were mandated reduced due to energy sanctions. This put stress on an already sensitive structure and caused it to fail.

weinzierl2• 4 years ago

Yes, that is widely reported now as a very preliminary cause. Also that it has been completely modernized in 2020. Here is a promotional video of the renovation activities: https://vimeo.com/530397162

anenefan2• 4 years ago

That's a real shame only a few fish survived. It's fortunate only two people hurt. That looks nasty from the picture. Maybe next time less brittle acrylic. Off the top of my head a 14 m high tower of water - there would have been approx 20 psi at the bottom of the tank.

gambiting• 4 years ago

Just fyi - acrylic is actually less brittle than glass.

someweirdperson• 4 years ago

The proper matetial to use is transparent aluminium [0] though.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=90eg_erObDo

anenefan2• 4 years ago

To be clear ... less brittle acrylic isn't glass.

zimpenfish4• 4 years ago

there would have been approx 20 psi at the bottom of the tank.

[1] agrees with you at 19.9psi

[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/hydrostatic-pressure-wate...

rob74• 4 years ago

Considering there was a hotel lobby under the aquarium, it's actually a miracle that only 2 people were hurt. Too bad for the fish though.

Also, there's a sentiment of "how could this happen, it was only upgraded two years ago?!" in all the articles I have read so far - maybe it happened precisely because of that? But let's see what the investigation will reveal...

tazjin• 4 years ago

it's actually a miracle that only 2 people were hurt

It probably helped that it happened at 6AM ...

Reason0773• 4 years ago

Yes, it could have been much worse if it had happened at, say, 6PM. Although some hotel lobbies can start to get busy even at that hour (airport hotels, etc).

petodo• 4 years ago

even earlier, 5:30-5:45 actually reported by guests, 5:43 fire alarm after broken front glass

preliminary cause - material fatigue

pcan77• 4 years ago

as someone who has an aquarium, i'm amazed it didn't happen in the middle of the night. Any time I've had an overflow issue or something, it's always in the middle of the night and my water sensor is blaring

TheHappyOddish• 4 years ago

Wow, what a shock! I stayed here in 2017 and often looked up at the aquarium whilst having a coffee or beer in the foyer.

Cthulhu_3• 4 years ago

I've stayed there as well for two nights a few years ago, it was a great attraction. Really, really large too - a million liters of water, five stories tall or higher, I don't even remember.

peoplefromibiza• 4 years ago

I've been there so many times, every time I went to Berlin, sad news.

It looked pretty cool and was a good place to bring people who didn't know Berlin after a visit to the beautiful Pergamonmuseum, which is 5 minutes walk away.

But I went on the elevator only the first time, it was clear that that wasn't a good idea at all.

leftbit• 4 years ago

It's just weird learning about interesting engineering accomplishments by news that they're gone forever...

bombcar10• 4 years ago

Agreed - it would be a interesting blog to report on these kind of things before they burst.

I know of the aquariums with tubes under/through the water, but this seems to be something different.

pvaldes13• 4 years ago

Water pressure is very high over 60cm tall for a standard glass panel. This is the reason to not have really big home aquariums for hobbyists in the market, unless you build it directly. They grow in surface instead to be taller

telesilla• 4 years ago

I had no idea this existed - all those visits to Berlin, wasted.

Looks like it was a remarkable elevator ride.

https://youtu.be/aM6niCCtOII

G3rn0ti• 4 years ago

I can confirm it was a great place to visit. I went there 2018 even as a Berlin native. The highlight of the tour was taking the elevator into that water dome. Impressive stuff.

Too sad it’s destroyed - hope insurance will cover all the damage. I wouldn’t want to switch places with the owner currently…

wwarner• 4 years ago

Thanks for the video link. You can see a seam in the tank as the lift rises.

SuperFine• 4 years ago

How come there's no footage?

williamscales• 4 years ago

I think it could take a little while to come out, but I'm sure they had cameras in the lobby. It did just happen this morning after all. The building's structural integrity is being checked.

bombcar10• 4 years ago

Exactly - the security cam footage takes a few days to be released if the company wants it, or a few weeks to leak quietly if they don't.

At 6 AM you're not going to have many people standing around with cell phone cams for it (and anyone around when the giant tank starts making horrible noises would be hopefully smart enough to run for higher ground).

halotrope• 4 years ago

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

robaato• 4 years ago

For some reason "A Fish Called Wanda" comes to mind!

Or maybe that should be "Fish go Wandering"?!

NoboruWataya• 4 years ago

This is crazy. I've been there a few times as the hotel is a popular spot for conferences (likely in part because of the attraction of the aquarium - I wonder if it will continue to be so popular a venue now). The aquarium was absolutely huge, I can't imagine what it must have been like seeing it burst.

Sadly I never availed of the elevator ride through the aquarium.

lqet4• 4 years ago

There are now many reports about material fatigue as the primary cause, but I am not so sure. Another article [0] mentioned that the building is currently analyzed by engineers because the firemen found cracks in floors and walls - they are, however, not sure if these cracks were caused by the water, or if they were already there before.

In the latter case, something could be wrong with the building's foundations. I am no expert, but if such a massive aquarium is only slightly tilted to one side, I would expect the forces acting on the glass to be ill-distributed. Material fatigue would then only be a secondary cause.

[0] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/ungluecke/aquarium-...

abduhl4• 4 years ago

Why would you expect the forces acting on the glass to be ill-distributed if the enclosure were tilted slightly? Water pressure acts hydrostatically. The enclosure appears to have a circular cross section. As long as the tilt is not severe there is no reason to believe anything other than tensile hoop stresses due to equal circumferential loading will develop.

a4a4a4a4• 4 years ago

The normal force of the tank wall to the floor will shear across the acrylic if it's not perfectly flat. Pressure outwards is normal to the tank wall relative to the water, but if this force goes diagonally through the floor, that's bad.

bombcar10• 4 years ago

I would expect it's not the tilted slightly that would matter but simply settling after installation - a settling foundation can crack concrete and glass so stresses could change if the foundation of the tank was moving.

jacquesm28• 4 years ago

That all depends on whether the underlying surface is still perfectly flat around the perimeter. If it is not then you get local stress variations that can lead to catastrophic failure.

The seams between the panels are likely also not designed to be loaded that way.

Just the asymmetrical load on the structure could do the trick at a relatively small angle because it might cause the structure to get compressed against something bordering it. This is not a trivial engineering project.

swader9994• 4 years ago

The hotel was told to lower their temperatures. With cold weather outside the differential between the tank and the lobby is the most likely cause.

jacquesm28• 4 years ago

That's a good guess, but I'd still like to see the final report if and when it is published and whether or not they manage to find the root cause. Likely the differential made the problem worse to the point that something gave but I suspect that there is a deeper underlying cause that made it sensitive to that difference in temperature to begin with. Either a material flaw, an assembly issue or something else.

barbegal4• 4 years ago

From an engineering perspective these sorts of acrylic tanks are a nightmare to ensure they are safe. The seams are impossible to inspect rigorously so the only real way of checking that they are safe is to load them with an excess pressure ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrostatic_test ). This can't be done with a tank of this size so the engineers can only real fall back on giving the tank excessive safety margins. But those safety margins cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for a tank this big so maybe they were reduced.

All it takes is one incorrect application of a seam bond and a small crack will form. The crack may take decades to propagate with no way of detecting it. When the seam opens up a bit the crack will then propagate the entire length of the seam extremely rapidly and the whole tank will fail. Ideally failures would be slow and predictable but this is impossible with acrylic.

These sorts of failures have occurred before https://www.plasticstoday.com/materials/when-acrylic-aquariu... and will keep occurring as long as this type of construction is used.

lqet4• 4 years ago

Would it be possible to construct a seamless acrylic tube, maybe on-site?

barbegal4• 4 years ago

Not of this size. Certainly single pieces are used in other applications where safety is even more critical such as submersibles. But manufacturing a tube this big would be impossible.

yencabulator• 4 years ago

You're making me think of this industrial scale 3D printer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL2KoMNzGTo

IndySun• 4 years ago

Thank you barbegal. Given the height and water volume in this instance, do you consider the people involved took too huge a risk? I do believe acrylic is used in aquaparks and zoo aquatic pools. I skimmed instances of acrylic/water fails. Dare I ask, is acrylic construction a significantly cheaper option to solid alternatives?

barbegal4• 4 years ago

There are no real alternatives. Glass has mostly the same bonding issues but is more expensive and heavier. Putting acrylic or glass panels in a steel frame dramatically reduces the probability of failure but you lose the wow factor of having a single sheet of transparent material.

I don't think any installation of this size can be truly safe. It has to be constructed in-situ being too large to transport so you would have to come up with some way of pressure testing the tank in-situ.

bombcar10• 4 years ago

Is there no way to detect cracks or is it just prohibitively expensive to do so?

I know that metal fatigue is a known thing that airlines check for and when they went to carbon fiber they had to develop tools to detect fatigue/cracks.

mardifoufs• 4 years ago

From my limited knowledge[0], it does not seem like this would be an easy structure to scan for inspection. Acrylic can even used for the wedges that interface between the phased array (or single element) probe [1] because it's very good at not interfering with ultrasounds. Water is also a very good "coupling" material, which makes it even harder to get a useful scan since there would be no "backwall" reflecting back the ultrasounds on the other side of the acrylic.

There are other ways to scan for defects, but I'm mostly familiar with ultrasound phased arrays. Other NDT methods are also hard to use in the field after manufacturing.

[0] I work in NDT (non destructive testing), but I'm not a physics engineer and (work further up the stack from the actual probes/scanners). So this is an approximation, and I might be wrong.

[1] This random link is pretty useful to get an idea I think, but I'll also ask around our inhouse scientists if I get the occasion today!

https://www.olympus-ims.com/en/ndt-tutorials/transducers/pha...

jws• 4 years ago

Acrylic and water have virtually the same index of refraction, so if the crack forms on the wet side of the wall and wicks in water you will not detect it visually.

It forms the basis of some magic tricks involving walking on or supporting things in water. (I say some, the rest are totally magic and you should enjoy them.)

matheusmoreira• 4 years ago

What's the best material for a tank like this, if not acrylic? Normal glass? Not educated on this subject.

BatFastard• 4 years ago

Ideally it would be extruded diamond, but that technology will not be available until early in the 26th century. Second would be clear aluminum, but again that will not be available for another 150 years.

iancmceachern• 4 years ago

Acrylic is the best material for this application we currently have. If we had a better material, we would use it.

Tossrock• 4 years ago

Polycarbonate is stronger and more shatter-resistant (it's used for fighter jet canopies, among other things) but also substantially more expensive.

jvandonsel• 4 years ago

Transparent aluminum

pvaldes13• 4 years ago

maybe we could focus in shape also, not only material.

usefulcat• 4 years ago

The article specifically says that this particular aquarium was made of glass?

gnabgib• 4 years ago

The article does, but "the AquaDom was a 25-metre-tall (82 ft) cylindrical acrylic glass aquarium"[0] Turns out that's just poor reporting, they could have been more specific. It was the largest (by volume) acrylic cylindrical aquarium in the world.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AquaDom

mc32• 4 years ago

Also, they focus on aesthetics.

They could have steel bands providing reinforcement which would be just slightly obtrusive at some angles, but boy, now it would have bands and well, it's not an uninterrupted glass [acrylic] cylinder.

weinzierl2• 4 years ago

I just saw a documentary (in German) from 2003 about its construction. There is an interview with a guy from the American (Colorado) company which built the tank who boasted that only two companies in the world could build it and the other one declined because they deemed it impossible. Other interesting facts were:

- 15 segments of acrylic glass

- 12 segments for the outer cylinder, 3 for the inner

- all segments worth 4 million EUR

- 200 wall thickness

- shipped in a steel construction

They did not say it, but from the video it looks like the segments were assembled in at the destination but not in their final location.

EDIT: I misunderstood, looks like the outer cylinder was assembled in-place, the inner one on-site and then lifted inside.

For completeness, here is the video, but it is in German:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E3KjGJ8AZzI

petre3• 4 years ago

Great engineering feat but it was a dumb idea to begin with. Just like sending people to Mars. Luckily nobody died, excluding the fish of course.

pantalaimon• 4 years ago

The thing was just recently reopened after revision, here is an interview after the overhaul: https://www.domaquaree.de/de/Modernisierung-AquaDom.html

Interesting bit:

It got a little tricky when taping off the glass envelope with foil to prevent possible cracks. Acrylic glass is a sensitive material that absorbs water over time. If it then dries out too quickly, cracks can appear even in the glass walls, which are up to 20 centimeters thick.

nuc1e0n• 4 years ago

They should've made this tank with transparent aluminum.

philodelta• 4 years ago

I know people got hurt (and fish died) but all I can think is, this is a hotel lobby, there most certainly IS security camera footage of the failure and subsequent deluge and man do I want to know what that looked like.

jacquesm28• 4 years ago

There likely will not be more than a few stills worth of interest, this happened very quickly judging by how far out the street is contaminated.

Nextgrid• 4 years ago

There might be legal/liability reasons why they’re not releasing the footage immediately.

Reminds me of the Champlain Towers accident - there were surveillance cameras everywhere, as well as a fire alarm control panel (that was critical to the incident as it would’ve been the one triggering an alarm to prompt everyone to evacuate) but no efforts were made to recover either despite the fire alarm panel checking in with the control centre several times (on battery power, over a mobile phone connection) after the collapse, proving that it was still alive and recoverable.

I guess they worked out that it was better to play dumb and let this evidence go away than recover it and potentially get into more trouble. I suspect it’s the same situation with the aquarium.

pvaldes13• 4 years ago

Just to add context we could be talking easily about more than $100,000 lost only in the fishes. The materials and pumps of the aquarium should be much worse.

After the strange coup try in Germany the last week, I wouldn't discard still that is not another destabilization attempt by some hypothetical agent. Weren't cameras set around the Hotel hall?

krisoft3• 4 years ago

After the strange coup try in Germany the last week, I wouldn't discard still that is not another destabilization attempt by some hypothetical agent.

How would that work? Is this site important enough to destabilize the country?

pvaldes13• 4 years ago

Only two people injured after a million liter water wave was a miracle. Could have been much worse.

But I'm probably just hypothesizing too much [again] while trying to analyze the case. It just feels strange coupled with the last long chain of strange events happening right now. To be fair, twenty years are a lot of time for an acrylic tank.

MKais• 4 years ago

Daily horoscope

- Pisces: A difficult day despite the expansion of your living space

- Scorpio: ...

fwungy5• 4 years ago

The root cause of this was that the hotel was forced to lower their heat due to energy sanctions. Reduced heat caused the aquarium to contract which contorted the structure, eventually causing the failure.

joezydeco2• 4 years ago

Citation?

You're also ignoring the thermal mass and physical pressure of a million liters of water.

mikeyouse• 4 years ago

They're pulling that "info" from the conspiracy theorist website zero hedge.. that it conveniently aligns with that site's support of Putinist Russia should be noted. The German law limits public space heating to 67º which doesn't seem like it should be nearly enough to cause this kind of failure..

fwungy5• 4 years ago

The issue was caused by the forced reduction in heating due to energy sanctions. The decreased warmth of the lobby caused the aquarium, which was sensitive due to its size and construction, to contract and contort to the point of structural failure.

krisoft3• 4 years ago

Do you have a source on that?

fwungy5• 4 years ago

Too early for an official RCA, but the surrounding facts of the known temperature sensitivity of the aquarium, the energy reduction mandates in Berlin, and the unusual cold point to that as the most likely cause.

This poster on Zerohedge provides more details:

I am directly involved in the legal cleanup of this and can provide a little more detail as to what actually happened (Tyler, reach out to me you have my email if you'd like to verify my identity here).

The city of Berlin required the hotel reduce the ambient temperature of the hotel lobby to save on energy due to sanctions. Its been abnormally cold in Berlin the past few nights dipping down to -11°C last night and -12°C the night before that. The water is heated to a constant temperature above 30°C for many of the fish species that lived in the tank.

As the nights got colder and colder, the lower ambient temperature of the air surrounding the tank likely started causing deformations and hairline cracks in the bottom of the tank where the pressure is the greatest. Last night at -11° caused the ambient temperature to drop too low given the reduced heating in the lobby and is what it looks like caused the "sudden unintentional disassembly"/catastrophic failure of the tank.

Everyone is already lawyering up including the city, the HVAC manufacturer, tank manufacturer, HVAC installer, building engineer, hotel - the litigation is going to be fun to watch and work on.

What isn't covered in the news is damage. The tank in 2003 cost €13 million. Today its orders of magnitude more expensive to replace, some of the fish were quite exotic and are expensive losses in and of themselves. Then you have the damage to the hotel lobby and façade, electrical components of the building in the three-story basement are also effected and large amounts of water went into the parking garage where many vehicles are parked not only from the hotel and offices but from an attached apartment complex to the hotel.

Losses are tens of millions. All because the city made the hotel turn down the heat.

LargoLasskhyfv• 4 years ago

Collateral damage from the launch of Cameron's Avatar 2.

SergeAx• 4 years ago

I stayed at the hotel this September. My first thought was "oh, my, there is a breakfast area right there on a ground floor, and it is starts buzzing right from 6am!”. Fortunately, the bang happened 20 mins before.

Interestingly, looking at the tank from my room, I never thought about the scenario when it breaks. I thought "engineers must put a lot of extra margin when constructing this". Turned out I was wrong.

bmc7505• 4 years ago

I stayed at the Radisson in 2019 for ICFP and was astounded at the poor quality of the building, which was undergoing renovations at the time. I distinctly remember noticing visible corrosion around the foundation of the tank structure.

smm11• 4 years ago

This sounds like the plot of a John Irving novel.

honeybadger1• 4 years ago

Horrible

bayesian_horse• 4 years ago

They found Nemo... everywhere...

todd8• 4 years ago

From the article: “None of the animals inside the saltwater aquarium, which contained clownfish, teira batfish and palette surgeonfish, survived.”

Cylindrical aquarium housing 1,500 exotic fish bursts in Berlin

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