BTwo people were injured when the large aquarium at Sea Life in Berlin burst. That said a spokesman for the Berlin fire department on Friday morning. The injured were taken to a hospital. It was initially not known whether they were employees of the hotel in which the aquarium was located or whether they were hotel guests.

According to the police, there is no evidence of a targeted, violent attack on the large aquarium. “Not at all at the moment,” a police spokesman said on Friday morning when asked. The cause is not yet known, spokesmen for the police and fire brigade emphasized.

According to the fire brigade, the giant tank with a million liters of water was destroyed very quickly. “If the aquarium is defective, then it bursts suddenly,” said a spokesman for the fire brigade. “It’s not a small crack from which the water is leaking, but the entire aquarium suddenly burst.” All of the around 1,500 fish that lived there are no longer in the water and are probably mostly dead. A politician who who stayed at the hotel reported that everything inside the hotel had been destroyed, with dead fish lying around everywhere. “This is a big disaster for the fish and the hotel.”

According to the fire brigade, a large part of the water probably ran through the doors on the ground floor onto the street and there into the gullies. Not much water was found in the basements. The destroyed ground floor was searched for people with rescue dogs.

The fire department previously reported on Twitter: “The aquarium is damaged, water is leaking. The situation is not clear at the moment.” The fire brigade is deployed with 100 emergency services in the DomAquarée district.

The Berlin traffic information center tweeted that Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, where the hotel with the aquarium is located, was closed. “There is a lot of water on the road. So far, the cause is still unclear.” The location is very close to Berlin’s Alexanderplatz with the television tower.

In the building complex called DomAquarée there is the large aquarium Sea Life and the so-called AquaDom with 1500 tropical fish, a well-known attraction in Berlin for many tourists. As stated on the DomAquarée website, the AquaDom is the “largest free-standing cylindrical aquarium in the world” and was extensively modernized by summer 2020.

The DomAquarée is a multifunctional building with a hotel, offices, restaurants and conference center. Sea Life is on the ground floor; the leisure attraction opened in 2004 with 30 dioramas of freshwater and saltwater pools, as well as an elevator through the Aqua Dom.

The huge glass cylinder rises six stories high in the building’s atrium, which partly serves as the lobby of the Radisson Hotel, and can be experienced from the hotel rooms on the atrium side, from the hotel elevators, the offices and the lofts in the glass roof.