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There are plenty of strategies hotels can harness in an attempt to set themselves apart from the rest of the pack. That includes the over-the-top spectacle that was installed in the lobby of a Radisson in Berlin in 2003 in the form of a 50-foot-tall aquarium capable of holding 264,000 gallons of water.
That installation—dubbed the “AquaDom”—was marketed as the world’s largest “cylindrical free-standing aquarium.” Guests who stayed at the hotel had the opportunity to book a room that gave them a view of the massive ecosystem, which featured a variety of aquatic plants and around 1,500 fish who called it home.
You may have noticed I employed the past tense in that previous paragraph, which is the result of a very unfortunate incident that transpired at the hotel on Friday morning. According to The New York Times, some guests got an incredibly unexpected wake-up call thanks to the “shock wave” that formed after the aquarium suddenly burst around 6 A.M., which sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of water (and the fish who’d been swimming in it) pouring into the lobby and basement of the Radisson in addition to the streets that surround it.
It’s still not entirely clear what caused the disastrous failure, but officials have speculated the unusually cold temperatures could have resulted in the water expanding enough to form a crack that ultimately compromised the structure’s integrity. While two people were hospitalized with lacerations caused by shards of glass, no one was seriously injured (sadly, none of the fish—including those witnesses say froze to death—are expected to survive).
The lack of life-threatening human casualties is especially surprising when you take a look at a video capturing the aftermath of the aquatic explosion that laid waste to the hotel’s lobby.
https://twitter.com/ahollenhorst001/status/1603667720221908998
I don’t envy the people tasked with cleaning that up.