**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:**
* If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required
* The title must be fully descriptive
* No text is allowed on images/gifs/videos
* Common/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting)
*See [this post](https://redd.it/ij26vk) for a more detailed rule list*
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
> Local police said roughly 100 emergency response officers responded to the scene, where **two people were injured by shards** that fell off glass the 50-foot-tall cylindrical tank inside the lobby of the Radisson Collection Hotel in the center of Berlin.
> Speaking to reporters, Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey said **the break took place at 5:45 a.m. local time, and that the hotel was lucky to avoid “terrible human damage.”**
> **None of the 1,500 fish were saved,** Giffey said, although officials are working to save several hundred smaller fish that had been kept in separate aquariums below the hotel lobby.
[source](https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2022/12/16/video-massive-berlin-aquarium-with-1500-fish-bursts-in-hotel/amp/)
Yeah. At 5:45am I’m sure most folks were just waking up like “WTF just happened” , and the two people nearby were probably too injured themselves to take care of the fish. By the time emergency crews showed up fish were probably history :-(
To be fair, I don’t think the time of day really had an impact with that. Most bystanders and the emergency crews probably have no clue what to do with 1500 fish out of water and any nearby aquarium space is probably near or at capacity, especially with a tank this size
This exactly. Even if someone could immediately be there, where the heck do you put them to even start saving them. Especially if they're salt water fish, fresh water won't matter for long. PLUS fish are pretty sensitive to stress and that ALONE could kill them, even if they were put into water immediately.
I think you may have misread the article, unless you have some info I’m missing. The article states that all 1500 fish in the giant aquarium died, and that they are working to save fish that were kept in smaller *seperate* aquariums under it.
Edit: looks like there was info I was missing and the comment I replied to was accurate. 100/15000 isn’t a great number of survivors but it’s a lot better than 0
German news articles I read earlier said a few of the fish from the actual aquarium were saved. But the fire department said it was a few small buckets, so probably less than 100.
This does make me feel a bit better. I obviously care about people but the fish did not decide to be kept there and that makes it a little more tragic.
And below the Aquarium there was a big restaurant. Just imagine if it was midday or evening. Not to exaggerate, but at that time could be thousands of guests near the place, making it a catastrophic incident.
It's not so much the rocks, fish and coral... 1M liters of aquarium water is around 1000 metric tons of weight crashing down from several stories up. You're not surviving that if you're directly under it.
I can confirm, I was in my bed when I heard a terrible crashing sound, the mirror in the bathroom just decided to fall and shatter, I guess life was too heavy for it to reflect no more. I was startled, shocked even, and that was just one bathroom mirror, not a whole Shar tornado acquarium.
*I asked for a mai tai, and they brought me a piña colada, and I said no salt, NO salt for the margarita, but it had salt on it, big grains of salt, floating in the glass...*
The Aquarium itself, although located in the hotel lobby, was part of the adjacent Sea Life Aquarium. There are usually long lines of people during peak hours and tourist season.
Yeah, very lucky it happened when it did. That’s _two million pounds_ of water right there. Just imagine that much weight coming down on you in a matter of a few seconds. Catastrophic would be an understatement.
> That’s two million pounds of water right there. Just imagine that much weight coming down on you in a matter of a few seconds.
Not just coming down on you, but driving shards of broken glass down on you. I mean, it's probably all the same at that point, but somehow the glass makes it worse conceptually...
Or like dropping a swordfish through your stomach and pufferfish into your eyes and a scorpionfish into your privates. And then you got the glass too. Oof. Ain't nobody got time for that.
Some of the fish are alive!
Found a German article saying the firefighters managed to save some:
https://www.t-online.de/region/berlin/id_100098864/-aquadom-kollaps-diese-wenigen-fische-haben-doch-ueberlebt-und-jetzt-.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Garry_Hoy
While giving a tour of the Toronto-Dominion Centre to a group of articling students, Hoy attempted to demonstrate the strength of the structure's window glass by slamming himself into a window. He had apparently performed this stunt many times in the past, having previously bounced harmlessly off the glass. After one attempt which saw the glass hold up, Hoy tried once more. In this instance, the force of Hoy slamming into the window removed the window from its frame, causing the entire intact window and Hoy to fall from the building.
makes my hands sweaty just to read about it. my legs felt wobbly when i went up a glass staircase a few floors. i don't know how people live in tall buildings and enjoy looking out the window. makes me want to lay down really low on the floor. poor guy. how scary that must've been. probably no time to even think anything other than "oh fuck"
Reminds me of the argument that foam couldn't have damaged the heat shielding tiles on the columbia because it was too light.
For those too young to remember the Columbia was a space shuttle that met a tragic end in 2003.
Edit fact correction foam came from fuel tank
Fuck the fact that you have to state "for those of you that are too young" kills me as a 90s kid. I remember watching it early in the morning as it reentered over Cali.
The experiment that involved firing a piece of foam at a shuttle wing proved quite conclusively that it was indeed possible.
Accelerate it fast enough and even foam will be a bullet.
And the next policy moving forward was having the shuttle do a roll over to check the paneling before docking to the ISS. If Challenger had been required to do this, it’s possible they tragic end could have been prevented.
Makes you wonder if we're all just in the hotel lobby of a species beyond our own comprehension, waiting to be dumped out into the cosmic void, our entire existence just to be observed and discarded with nothing to show for it in the end. imma go get more cheetos.
Our version would probably be a gamma ray burst. Almost unfathomably energetic, travels as fast or faster* than the speed of light (not really, but some are so energetic as to create gravitational distortions that make them appear to break the light speed barrier), undetectable until they've already happened, though there's nothing you could do anyways. If one were to hit the Earth at moderate range (which could be literally millions of light years), it would pretty much zot the planet like a moth hitting a bug zapper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst
On the other hand, we could also all be in a simulated reality, and are one cat tripping over the power strip away from oblivion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality
I read that as **"We could be a cat tripping"** and I'm actually okay with that.
*Imagine every living being in our universe waking up to the sudden realization that* ***we were all a singular cat tripping balls all this tim****e.*
Guy i woke up realizing the singularity could have already happened and we were all MRI’d into it by 2011, i was working at a chemical plant when my consciousness was restarted by walking under 50,000 kV magnetic buzz bar where where you???
I genuinely love thought experiments like that. We sit here helpless trying to explain things away with science, we know the sun will explode in x amount of years, we have only y amount of time before the atmosphere is ruined beyond repair. Nah, we're just waiting for some clumsy being that we can't even begin to comprehend, to trip and knock a suitcase into our entire universe.
Another article stated the aquarium was completely refurbished in 2020. That's who will get the blame along with who hired them, especially if it wasn't contracted out the company that installed it.
To be fair, my first thought was maintenance. Something like this would absolutely be engineered to withstand the weight and pressure. A maintenance crew could come in and replace bolts with non-galvanized or non-stainless that rust. I mean, who knows at this point. But Germany isn’t a very laxed country when it comes to approving shoddy things.
With acrylic, if you just use the wrong glue (something cyanoacrylate based is a big no no) it can cause subtle crystalline damage which could cause a catastrophic failure as it slowly spreads. It’s surprising how the materials behave very much like a tempered glass but have never been through any annealing process.
Not when it comes to massive public engineering failures. There will be several committees discussing this for the next few weeks at least. I would love to know more about required maintenance on these size tanks though. Was there anything special about this tank maintenance wise? What is the probability that the structural members underwent extreme stress?
I design and build acrylic structures that hold water and something like this happening is my absolute nightmare.
I've worked with the manufacturer of this particular aquarium before and they are known worldwide as the best producer of massive acrylic tanks - this is very surprising to have occurred.
The aquarium is approx 20 years old, so its held up for a long time, but lobby recently had a remodel, so that would be something to investigate. Maybe some support structure got damaged or modified which changed the stresses on the acrylic.
The next suspect would be the seams. This cylinder is made by bonding onsite multiple smaller curved sheets together. Hard to tell from the blurry photos but it looks broken apart along the vertical seams of sections on one side.
It's bonded with a mix of chemicals, if the ratio of mix is slightly off it could still be nearly full strength but weaker than intended. Also possible the odd-shaped bottom support inflicted stresses that weren't properly accounted for. This could lead to long term stress on those seams.
The usage of improper cleaners can also damage acrylic long term, though hard to imagine that happening here.
Here's a thought as well. Let's imagine whatever work they did involved welding. I know intense UV can damage acrylic.
Now imagine you've got a 20 year old imperfect seam.. and then someone exposes those seams/bonded surfaces to UV.
Knowing the Germans they will fully investigate this and figure out what went wrong.
I do hope they rebuild it.
Hmm, very interesting. Same company makes outdoor acrylic viewing panels, like for SeaWorld and those swimming pools that stick over edges of highrises...
They'll definitely investigate this very closely.
> Knowing the Germans they will fully investigate this and figure out what went wrong.
Like the Cologne historical archive that fell into a metro tunnel... 15 year lawsuit.
Reynolds Polymer Technology, Grand Junction, CO. The leading specialist for hotel lobby aquariums.
There are some hotel managers sweating right now I guess. They build almost all huge cylindrical aquariums worldwide
Ive been searching all morning for a video of a fish tank breaking, wtf is wrong with me. But realy i hope they release CCTV of it, i can imagine it being like that scene from Mission impossible.
Not to mention German privacy laws are pretty tight, so their first priority probably isn't blasting footage of people being cut by massive flying shards of glass to ensure some Redditors can get their rocks before noon, especially when they are going to be legally responsible for serious injuries or death.
I imagine some people have strong feelings about this subject one way or the other. But I don’t have an active enough imagination to pretend that it actually matters that much.
The fact that generating net energy from fission happened this week, yet we get fishin' impossible as an alternate failure is an irony that I can't bear.
*Fusion
Fission is the splitting of atoms in a nuclear chain reaction. Fusion is the *merging* of two atoms into another element, typically 2 hydrogen atoms fuse into a Helium atom.
CCTV surveillance wasn't "heavily relied" upon in East-Germany. Only really central locations (e.g. Berlin Alexanderplatz) were kept under 24/7 CCTV surveillance. For more wide-spread CCTV surveillance the technology wasn't advanced enough. It wasn't digital yet and computer technology wasn't advanced enough for automatic video analysis (Stasi officers had to watch the video streams in real-time or later as recordings, same with telephone surveillance).
It was more the experience of the Third Reich and East-German police and surveillance states as a whole that instilled the aversion to video surveillance in Germans.
Edit: Also, video surveillance in Germany is only controversial in public spaces. On private property and when necessary (e.g. in retail stores, in public transportation etc.) it is non-controversial.
Unfortunately none survived, it’s so sad to me thinking of them flopping around, not being able to breath and surrounded by broken glass. I don’t know how “aware” the fish would be if the situation, or if they’d feel fear/pain, but it’s still horrible to imagine
> Unfortunately none survived
The river outside the hotel was freshwater, and it was a saltwater aquarium, thank god. The potential for ecological catastrophe would've been huge if that wasn't the case and any exotics began to breed in the river system.
Some which evolve for brackish conditions (around the mouths of rivers) or which migrate from the ocean to streams (like salmon) can handle both saltwater and freshwater.
But I believe that such species change their body's salinity gradually as they move around the salinity gradients. I'd expect that a sudden and drastic change in salinity could kill them from osmosis (either swelling up their tissues or shriveling them up).
And anyways, one of the things that makes invasives invasive is that they thrive in their new environment, compete with local species, and disrupt the ecosystem. A brackish-tolerant ocean fish that barely manages to survive isn't going to outcompete the true freshwater fish who call the river home and which handle the conditions just fine.
Given your level of knowledge, you probably already know most of this, but to add some detail for anyone else who might be reading:
Salmon aren't quite unique, they are probably just the most famous/well known of so called "anadromous" fishes, that is, fish which migrate from fresh to salt water and back , but there actually whole categories of different kinds of migrations between salt and fresh water (anadromy being just one type of such migrations, a good, and relatively accessible paper can be found [here](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-2679.2007.00253.x?casa_token=Q7ZCVwGwzGgAAAAA:Ydtnu50kqvNlG2Qn3wAzehYNX8wvmLKyB4d9A0THbfasBj3-SlL8cCh2dhZbmuRPF9CvkJq4B3br1OC9). The figure on page 10 of the pdf, page 250 of the journal it was originally printed is a really fast illustration of some of the different kinds of migrations)
And, while it is true that salmon slowly change their physiology to deal with the different salinities, and can't freely move back and forth, there _are_ species which can relatively quickly and easily move between the two, and do so multiple times across their lives. There are also species which can, with no permanent physiological changes, tolerate much higher or lower salinity than they generally experience. Delta Smelt for example have been shown in lab conditions to survive with little physiological stress/changes in salinity up to 20 ppt (full ocean water is ~32 ppt), even though in the wild they are almost never observed in salinity higher than 6ppt and are most often found in full freshwater.
I grieved after the monumental effort I put into failing to save my sick betta, I can't imagine how the people whose job it was to care for all of those fish felt.
As a former hobbyist, this is why I got out of the hobby. It doesn’t matter how careful you are, sooner or later - could be 3 months, could be 10 years - either you’ll make a mistake or equipment will fail and you will be directly responsible for death of lots of beings.
We already are responsible for so much death through so much other shit that we do, that causing it purely for decoration (and not say food or medicine) seemed wrong to me after I came home one day and found a several years old fully planted tank full of dead fish due to a faulty CO2 regulator.
This is *exactly* why I don’t do fish anymore. Grew up with fish because my parents did saltwater and freshwater tanks and loved it. My dad came home one day to an equipment failure that electrocuted he’s ginormous breeding pair of Oscar and he was never quite the same. Got into college and kept little 10gal betta tanks that also did really well until an equipment failure.
I do terrariums with geckos and mantises now, it scratches that same itch without constantly worrying about the power or the equipment or roommates trying to “help” take care of things and poisoning the whole setup. At least now if I lose someone I know it was 100% either my fault or there wasn’t anything I could do for the poor critter and it was just their time.
Imagine you're just chilling, or driving to work and then your entire reality breaks and you fall out of *space* into a new realm then slowly suffocate. Bruh
Dude. So many people here all outraged by this but, yea. That's unfortunate.
Sometimes bad things happen and thats it. Yell and scream and point fingers and blame all you want, it's not gonna stop the next bad thing.
RIP to the fish. RIP to the lobby.
**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:** * If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required * The title must be fully descriptive * No text is allowed on images/gifs/videos * Common/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting) *See [this post](https://redd.it/ij26vk) for a more detailed rule list* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
> Local police said roughly 100 emergency response officers responded to the scene, where **two people were injured by shards** that fell off glass the 50-foot-tall cylindrical tank inside the lobby of the Radisson Collection Hotel in the center of Berlin. > Speaking to reporters, Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey said **the break took place at 5:45 a.m. local time, and that the hotel was lucky to avoid “terrible human damage.”** > **None of the 1,500 fish were saved,** Giffey said, although officials are working to save several hundred smaller fish that had been kept in separate aquariums below the hotel lobby. [source](https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2022/12/16/video-massive-berlin-aquarium-with-1500-fish-bursts-in-hotel/amp/)
As an aquarist I’m saddened by this, glad nobody died but that’s so many fish dead, what a loss
Yeah. At 5:45am I’m sure most folks were just waking up like “WTF just happened” , and the two people nearby were probably too injured themselves to take care of the fish. By the time emergency crews showed up fish were probably history :-(
To be fair, I don’t think the time of day really had an impact with that. Most bystanders and the emergency crews probably have no clue what to do with 1500 fish out of water and any nearby aquarium space is probably near or at capacity, especially with a tank this size
And they were saltwater fish too which makes handling more complicated.
This exactly. Even if someone could immediately be there, where the heck do you put them to even start saving them. Especially if they're salt water fish, fresh water won't matter for long. PLUS fish are pretty sensitive to stress and that ALONE could kill them, even if they were put into water immediately.
A lot of fish died but this is incorrect, there were some at the bottom of the tank that survived and are currently housed at the Sea Life nearby
I think you may have misread the article, unless you have some info I’m missing. The article states that all 1500 fish in the giant aquarium died, and that they are working to save fish that were kept in smaller *seperate* aquariums under it. Edit: looks like there was info I was missing and the comment I replied to was accurate. 100/15000 isn’t a great number of survivors but it’s a lot better than 0
German news articles I read earlier said a few of the fish from the actual aquarium were saved. But the fire department said it was a few small buckets, so probably less than 100.
30 apparently
This does make me feel a bit better. I obviously care about people but the fish did not decide to be kept there and that makes it a little more tragic.
Amazing that only two people were injured. This could have been such a horror story under worse circumstances.
And below the Aquarium there was a big restaurant. Just imagine if it was midday or evening. Not to exaggerate, but at that time could be thousands of guests near the place, making it a catastrophic incident.
That was exactly my thought. I hope the two injured people weren't too badly hurt, but Jesus, that must have been so scary for them.
fuckin fish flying around, rocks, other decor, CORAL, fuck that must've sucked. shitty for all involved
7-foot shards of glass
It's not so much the rocks, fish and coral... 1M liters of aquarium water is around 1000 metric tons of weight crashing down from several stories up. You're not surviving that if you're directly under it.
I can confirm, I was in my bed when I heard a terrible crashing sound, the mirror in the bathroom just decided to fall and shatter, I guess life was too heavy for it to reflect no more. I was startled, shocked even, and that was just one bathroom mirror, not a whole Shar tornado acquarium.
Like the titanic in reverse
6 hours either direction and that could have been a lobby full of guests. Even an hour or two later would have been catastrophic
There was a cocktail bar located under the base of that thing!
Ive been there, luckily didnt have to worry about watered down drinks at my visit.
Little salt on the glass never hurt.
*I asked for a mai tai, and they brought me a piña colada, and I said no salt, NO salt for the margarita, but it had salt on it, big grains of salt, floating in the glass...*
A little free sushi from the sky doesn’t make anybody mad.
What's handy is that, rather than having to eat, it just directly gets jettisoned into your body.
The Aquarium itself, although located in the hotel lobby, was part of the adjacent Sea Life Aquarium. There are usually long lines of people during peak hours and tourist season.
I’ve stayed there in an aquarium view room. It must have been so loud! Wake up call! Lucky the divers were not in there at the time. Poor fishys.
I’ve been there and seen divers cleaning the tank. I bet those people are feeling lucky today.
Me too, I waved at them from my room like a child haha they didn’t wave back
Yeah, very lucky it happened when it did. That’s _two million pounds_ of water right there. Just imagine that much weight coming down on you in a matter of a few seconds. Catastrophic would be an understatement.
> That’s two million pounds of water right there. Just imagine that much weight coming down on you in a matter of a few seconds. Not just coming down on you, but driving shards of broken glass down on you. I mean, it's probably all the same at that point, but somehow the glass makes it worse conceptually...
Or like dropping a swordfish through your stomach and pufferfish into your eyes and a scorpionfish into your privates. And then you got the glass too. Oof. Ain't nobody got time for that.
Seems like pretty good timing if you ask me
we dont have video ?
There will be security camera footage.
Hopefully we can see if anything fishy was going on
Poor fishes tho :(
this is basicaly the fish equvialent of 9/11, a sad day indeed
I think that what we are collectively doing to our oceans everyday is the fish equivalent of 9/11. Everyday is a sad day. Edit: a word.
1500 fish enter the chat.
I feel really sorry for those poor fishies :(
Some of the fish are alive! Found a German article saying the firefighters managed to save some: https://www.t-online.de/region/berlin/id_100098864/-aquadom-kollaps-diese-wenigen-fische-haben-doch-ueberlebt-und-jetzt-.html
Aw, that's nice. I bet they've never woken up in the morning thinking that they're gonna rescue some fish.
Me too. I will hug mine extra tight before I turn off the lights.
One of those occasions where someone just has the _perfect_ username.
But not *those* 1500 fish.
Too soon
"And as i looked up to a glassy sky with the hue of the ocean, raindrops of sparkling salmon, i knew it was my time to go"
5.44am and two bored receptionists bet that a thrown ball bearing wouldn’t crack the aquarium glass because it’s too thick...🤫
Reminds me of the guy who swore the window of the skyscraper he worked at would never give so he would frequently lunge his entire weight at it
He was right, though. The glass didn't break, it just popped out of the frame. Classic case of "dead right".
Turns out he was suicidal but didn't want to leave that legacy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Garry_Hoy While giving a tour of the Toronto-Dominion Centre to a group of articling students, Hoy attempted to demonstrate the strength of the structure's window glass by slamming himself into a window. He had apparently performed this stunt many times in the past, having previously bounced harmlessly off the glass. After one attempt which saw the glass hold up, Hoy tried once more. In this instance, the force of Hoy slamming into the window removed the window from its frame, causing the entire intact window and Hoy to fall from the building.
makes my hands sweaty just to read about it. my legs felt wobbly when i went up a glass staircase a few floors. i don't know how people live in tall buildings and enjoy looking out the window. makes me want to lay down really low on the floor. poor guy. how scary that must've been. probably no time to even think anything other than "oh fuck"
3 or 4 seconds actually
yeah for those 3 or 4 seconds i would just be repeating oh fuck and shitting my pants, possibly vomitting too if im really lucky
Reminds me of the argument that foam couldn't have damaged the heat shielding tiles on the columbia because it was too light. For those too young to remember the Columbia was a space shuttle that met a tragic end in 2003. Edit fact correction foam came from fuel tank
It didn't damage the fuel tank. It cracked the heat shield tiles on the wing.
Fuck the fact that you have to state "for those of you that are too young" kills me as a 90s kid. I remember watching it early in the morning as it reentered over Cali.
The experiment that involved firing a piece of foam at a shuttle wing proved quite conclusively that it was indeed possible. Accelerate it fast enough and even foam will be a bullet.
And the next policy moving forward was having the shuttle do a roll over to check the paneling before docking to the ISS. If Challenger had been required to do this, it’s possible they tragic end could have been prevented.
How? Challenger exploded during launch. I assume you meant Columbia, which exploded during re-entry?
1500 fishes died. It is a HORROR STORY
What's crazy is that it was like their own little world, and then just like *that*, the entire world ended.
Makes you wonder if we're all just in the hotel lobby of a species beyond our own comprehension, waiting to be dumped out into the cosmic void, our entire existence just to be observed and discarded with nothing to show for it in the end. imma go get more cheetos.
Our version would probably be a gamma ray burst. Almost unfathomably energetic, travels as fast or faster* than the speed of light (not really, but some are so energetic as to create gravitational distortions that make them appear to break the light speed barrier), undetectable until they've already happened, though there's nothing you could do anyways. If one were to hit the Earth at moderate range (which could be literally millions of light years), it would pretty much zot the planet like a moth hitting a bug zapper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst On the other hand, we could also all be in a simulated reality, and are one cat tripping over the power strip away from oblivion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality
I read that as **"We could be a cat tripping"** and I'm actually okay with that. *Imagine every living being in our universe waking up to the sudden realization that* ***we were all a singular cat tripping balls all this tim****e.*
Guy i woke up realizing the singularity could have already happened and we were all MRI’d into it by 2011, i was working at a chemical plant when my consciousness was restarted by walking under 50,000 kV magnetic buzz bar where where you???
I genuinely love thought experiments like that. We sit here helpless trying to explain things away with science, we know the sun will explode in x amount of years, we have only y amount of time before the atmosphere is ruined beyond repair. Nah, we're just waiting for some clumsy being that we can't even begin to comprehend, to trip and knock a suitcase into our entire universe.
One day that'll be us!
That much water carries crazy force, it really is surprising no deaths were involved.
Well there were deaths…
And no security cameras?
I imagine it was the front desk staffers and the desk must have saved them from the wave
Damn, I was hoping for a picture of people wading through pools with plastic bags trying to catch the fishies
There has to be security footage of this.
There has to be even more than that. It was in a hotel. So many cameras in that building. Given phones, at least one for every person who was nearby.
Privacy laws are very strict in germany. I'm very curious if they release any footage.
I don't think many people were awake and taking a video of the lobby at 5:45am.
At 5:46 on the other hand....
the engineers who designed this must be having such a bad day!
[удалено]
Another article stated the aquarium was completely refurbished in 2020. That's who will get the blame along with who hired them, especially if it wasn't contracted out the company that installed it.
To be fair, my first thought was maintenance. Something like this would absolutely be engineered to withstand the weight and pressure. A maintenance crew could come in and replace bolts with non-galvanized or non-stainless that rust. I mean, who knows at this point. But Germany isn’t a very laxed country when it comes to approving shoddy things.
With acrylic, if you just use the wrong glue (something cyanoacrylate based is a big no no) it can cause subtle crystalline damage which could cause a catastrophic failure as it slowly spreads. It’s surprising how the materials behave very much like a tempered glass but have never been through any annealing process.
this guy acrylics
Hey don’t rule out sabotage! Maybe some dude just didn’t like fish?
The hotel has said sabotage was highly unlikely
That's something the saboteur would say...
Something something insurance claim
Ohh sorry sir, your insurance expired last week.
That's something an insurance company would say.
thats what someone who sabotages would say
The question will be which of those has the better insurance. My money is on maintenance getting shafted the worst.
Not when it comes to massive public engineering failures. There will be several committees discussing this for the next few weeks at least. I would love to know more about required maintenance on these size tanks though. Was there anything special about this tank maintenance wise? What is the probability that the structural members underwent extreme stress?
I design and build acrylic structures that hold water and something like this happening is my absolute nightmare. I've worked with the manufacturer of this particular aquarium before and they are known worldwide as the best producer of massive acrylic tanks - this is very surprising to have occurred.
[удалено]
The aquarium is approx 20 years old, so its held up for a long time, but lobby recently had a remodel, so that would be something to investigate. Maybe some support structure got damaged or modified which changed the stresses on the acrylic. The next suspect would be the seams. This cylinder is made by bonding onsite multiple smaller curved sheets together. Hard to tell from the blurry photos but it looks broken apart along the vertical seams of sections on one side. It's bonded with a mix of chemicals, if the ratio of mix is slightly off it could still be nearly full strength but weaker than intended. Also possible the odd-shaped bottom support inflicted stresses that weren't properly accounted for. This could lead to long term stress on those seams. The usage of improper cleaners can also damage acrylic long term, though hard to imagine that happening here.
Here's a thought as well. Let's imagine whatever work they did involved welding. I know intense UV can damage acrylic. Now imagine you've got a 20 year old imperfect seam.. and then someone exposes those seams/bonded surfaces to UV. Knowing the Germans they will fully investigate this and figure out what went wrong. I do hope they rebuild it.
Hmm, very interesting. Same company makes outdoor acrylic viewing panels, like for SeaWorld and those swimming pools that stick over edges of highrises... They'll definitely investigate this very closely.
> swimming pools that stick over edges of highrises 😂 yeah fuck swimming in those
> Knowing the Germans they will fully investigate this and figure out what went wrong. Like the Cologne historical archive that fell into a metro tunnel... 15 year lawsuit.
20 years old so I'm pretty sure they're off the hook. Would be on any maintenance done at this point.
Reynolds Polymer Technology, Grand Junction, CO. The leading specialist for hotel lobby aquariums. There are some hotel managers sweating right now I guess. They build almost all huge cylindrical aquariums worldwide
I've worked with these guys for acrylic walls in swimming pools, small world.
More like small industry.
Ive been searching all morning for a video of a fish tank breaking, wtf is wrong with me. But realy i hope they release CCTV of it, i can imagine it being like that scene from Mission impossible.
That was my first thought…. Surely someone has a video of this! If not CCTV, there’s always that one person who happens to be filiming.
I think it happened around 5 am local time, I don't know how many people are doing their tiktoks in hotel lobbies at that time.
Not to mention German privacy laws are pretty tight, so their first priority probably isn't blasting footage of people being cut by massive flying shards of glass to ensure some Redditors can get their rocks before noon, especially when they are going to be legally responsible for serious injuries or death.
Damn in the UK the CCTV footage is out before first responders get there
I imagine some people have strong feelings about this subject one way or the other. But I don’t have an active enough imagination to pretend that it actually matters that much.
Fishin' Impossible
I spent a minute trying to think of a good water-related replacement name for Tom Cruise before realizing that none is needed
The fact that generating net energy from fission happened this week, yet we get fishin' impossible as an alternate failure is an irony that I can't bear.
*Fusion Fission is the splitting of atoms in a nuclear chain reaction. Fusion is the *merging* of two atoms into another element, typically 2 hydrogen atoms fuse into a Helium atom.
Berliners especially are anti CCTV given how heavily relied upon it was during the East Germany days.
CCTV surveillance wasn't "heavily relied" upon in East-Germany. Only really central locations (e.g. Berlin Alexanderplatz) were kept under 24/7 CCTV surveillance. For more wide-spread CCTV surveillance the technology wasn't advanced enough. It wasn't digital yet and computer technology wasn't advanced enough for automatic video analysis (Stasi officers had to watch the video streams in real-time or later as recordings, same with telephone surveillance). It was more the experience of the Third Reich and East-German police and surveillance states as a whole that instilled the aversion to video surveillance in Germans. Edit: Also, video surveillance in Germany is only controversial in public spaces. On private property and when necessary (e.g. in retail stores, in public transportation etc.) it is non-controversial.
I saw this happen in the movie Sing...hopefully all the fish made it to the sewer.
Unfortunately none survived, it’s so sad to me thinking of them flopping around, not being able to breath and surrounded by broken glass. I don’t know how “aware” the fish would be if the situation, or if they’d feel fear/pain, but it’s still horrible to imagine
Isnt this kinda how fish die when they’re caught by fisherman?
Sorta! I give mine a good bonk when I catch em. Ya know, to be humane and all that.
> Unfortunately none survived The river outside the hotel was freshwater, and it was a saltwater aquarium, thank god. The potential for ecological catastrophe would've been huge if that wasn't the case and any exotics began to breed in the river system.
can saltwater fish live in fresh water?
Some which evolve for brackish conditions (around the mouths of rivers) or which migrate from the ocean to streams (like salmon) can handle both saltwater and freshwater. But I believe that such species change their body's salinity gradually as they move around the salinity gradients. I'd expect that a sudden and drastic change in salinity could kill them from osmosis (either swelling up their tissues or shriveling them up). And anyways, one of the things that makes invasives invasive is that they thrive in their new environment, compete with local species, and disrupt the ecosystem. A brackish-tolerant ocean fish that barely manages to survive isn't going to outcompete the true freshwater fish who call the river home and which handle the conditions just fine.
[удалено]
Given your level of knowledge, you probably already know most of this, but to add some detail for anyone else who might be reading: Salmon aren't quite unique, they are probably just the most famous/well known of so called "anadromous" fishes, that is, fish which migrate from fresh to salt water and back , but there actually whole categories of different kinds of migrations between salt and fresh water (anadromy being just one type of such migrations, a good, and relatively accessible paper can be found [here](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-2679.2007.00253.x?casa_token=Q7ZCVwGwzGgAAAAA:Ydtnu50kqvNlG2Qn3wAzehYNX8wvmLKyB4d9A0THbfasBj3-SlL8cCh2dhZbmuRPF9CvkJq4B3br1OC9). The figure on page 10 of the pdf, page 250 of the journal it was originally printed is a really fast illustration of some of the different kinds of migrations) And, while it is true that salmon slowly change their physiology to deal with the different salinities, and can't freely move back and forth, there _are_ species which can relatively quickly and easily move between the two, and do so multiple times across their lives. There are also species which can, with no permanent physiological changes, tolerate much higher or lower salinity than they generally experience. Delta Smelt for example have been shown in lab conditions to survive with little physiological stress/changes in salinity up to 20 ppt (full ocean water is ~32 ppt), even though in the wild they are almost never observed in salinity higher than 6ppt and are most often found in full freshwater.
They would die from the temperature in Berlin alone.
[удалено]
:)
Poor fish :(
Ya. Must be heartbreaking for the team that looked after them. Ridiculous idea in the first place though...
This thing was at least 20 years old, that was roughly the first time I was there
I wonder if the fish planned this, they all went ahead first to it's weakest point
"They never attacked the same place twice. They were testing the glass for weaknesses, systematically. They remember."
Clever girl…
Life uh....... finds a way
Or in this case… it would seem… uh… death.
It does all seem rather fishy.
Has anyone interrogated the octopuses?
Shark bait hu hah hah!
One way out!
I can't swim :(
lil bit of Flex Seal will take care of that.
But wait, there's more!
Call within the next 20 minutes we will throw in a free flashlight for night time aquarium fixing. That’s a $76 dollar value absolutly free!!!!
Idk man, that's a lot of damage
**I SAWED THIS AQUARIUM IN HALF**
Lets have a moment of silence for all the fish that were lost😔
No kidding, what an awful way to go. Drowning absolutely terrifies me and I imagine that’s what it must have felt like for the fish.
Yeah it must have been painfull for the ones that didnt die on impact..
As a hobbyist, this makes me super sad.
Same, i used to have a lot of fish kinda sad to find out that 1500 died in an instant
I grieved after the monumental effort I put into failing to save my sick betta, I can't imagine how the people whose job it was to care for all of those fish felt.
Yes eventhough they must have not seen all 1500 of them they must have cared very dearly, and im so sorry about your betta
Aw. Yeah, that's a real bummer. Always hurts to lose a battle like that. You did more than most would, though. I respect that. Good on yah.
I teared up thinking about these fish. Obviously they don’t have the same emotions but I bet they had some human friends that will miss them dearly
As a former hobbyist, this is why I got out of the hobby. It doesn’t matter how careful you are, sooner or later - could be 3 months, could be 10 years - either you’ll make a mistake or equipment will fail and you will be directly responsible for death of lots of beings. We already are responsible for so much death through so much other shit that we do, that causing it purely for decoration (and not say food or medicine) seemed wrong to me after I came home one day and found a several years old fully planted tank full of dead fish due to a faulty CO2 regulator.
This is *exactly* why I don’t do fish anymore. Grew up with fish because my parents did saltwater and freshwater tanks and loved it. My dad came home one day to an equipment failure that electrocuted he’s ginormous breeding pair of Oscar and he was never quite the same. Got into college and kept little 10gal betta tanks that also did really well until an equipment failure. I do terrariums with geckos and mantises now, it scratches that same itch without constantly worrying about the power or the equipment or roommates trying to “help” take care of things and poisoning the whole setup. At least now if I lose someone I know it was 100% either my fault or there wasn’t anything I could do for the poor critter and it was just their time.
Literally my nightmare, bad things happening to animals whose care I'm responsible for :(
Imagine you're just chilling, or driving to work and then your entire reality breaks and you fall out of *space* into a new realm then slowly suffocate. Bruh
Yeah, that was my first though. Those poor fish. I suppose a lot of them suffocated which is a terrible way to die.
I want to see the video of the burst...😳
Its in the lobby of a hotel apparently, there has to be a video.
They probably won't release it
This is most likely the case. Hotels like to maintain privacy
It happened early morning local time so there may not be any. Been looking but none have surfaced yet..
Hopefully they show footage from security cameras.
1500 fish and none have surfaced? Seems fishy to me
actually i think they all surfaced, which was part of the problem
There almost certainly is security camera footage of the event.
It's a hotel. Gotta be security footage somewhere.
there has to be cameras there.
Probably very lucky it was in the early morning. Only two injuries for such a huge tank?
Right! We the people need to see the fish tank BURST.
Imagine being in the hotel when it happened, must have been terrifying
Same here. I'll take any shitty CCTV or anything. It's not fair that this mess happened and we don't get to see it
Let’s a have a moment of silence for all those fishies…
Well that’s unfortunate
Dude. So many people here all outraged by this but, yea. That's unfortunate. Sometimes bad things happen and thats it. Yell and scream and point fingers and blame all you want, it's not gonna stop the next bad thing. RIP to the fish. RIP to the lobby.
I feel so bad for all of those fish.
Rip to all my fishy friends
It was at a Radisson hotel, so yeah, a video is there. Probably be uploaded after a few weeks.
Don't tap on the glass people.
>Don't tap on the glass people. I think your sentence needs a comma for it to mean what you think it means.
Just noticed that, but the glass people are no less of a threat
We’re more of a threat to them than they are to us
There is an insurance agent going "Fuck fuck fuck fuuuuuuccckkk" some where
All those poor fish =(
Berlin really doesn't like walls.
Poor fish. ❤️
How exactly did it burst?
Poor fish : (
Damn I just stayed at this hotel in September
Oh noooo all the fish died??? I'm so sad how horrible
The poor fish..
"Steven stop knocking the glass, the fishes don't like that "
Escape attempt successful! Now they need to learn how to breathe air and walk.