The elderly woman, wrapped in a winter coat, pulls a large trolley case down Spandauer Strasse, straight towards two police officers. They are standing at a folding table with sheets of paper on which various names are written. The older woman’s name is added.
She is one of the 400 hotel guests registered by the police here. You will then be directed to two buses in which it is much warmer on this Friday morning near Alexanderplatz. One bus belongs to the Berlin fire brigade, one to the BVG, they are right next to the folding table.
But before the woman gets in, she says: “The whole bed shook, I thought it was an earthquake.”
It was the bursting of the large Aquadom aquarium.
A million liters of water poured out
A million liters of salt water spilled over the ground floor of the Radisson Hotel around 5.30am on Friday. The huge water cylinder, consisting of acrylic glass up to 20 centimeters thick, broke in a matter of seconds, the masses of water spread to the lobby, Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse and the hotel’s underground car park.
Two people were injured and around 1,500 fish were washed away. “In the entrance area it looks almost like it was in the war,” said a spokesman for the fire brigade in the morning.
A broken clay jar across the street
The rest of the debris, swept away by the sheer force of the water, is scattered on the street: metal poles, flower pots, pieces of wood, green plants. A huge clay pot has even been swept across the street. It lies broken between two e-scooters.
The fire brigade is on site with around 100 emergency services, the police have cordoned off the scene of the accident. BSR vehicles scatter salt and sand on the mirror-smooth road. “It was salt water,” says a spokesman for the fire brigade, “despite all the misfortune, you have to say: fortunately. Otherwise it would have been even slippery on the road.”
Two people were slightly injured and are being treated at the hospital. Adrian Wentzel, another fire department spokesman, said around 10 a.m. that “no other people are missing at this time”.
Rescue dogs sniff the rubble
But that doesn’t mean that nobody is lying under the rubble. So there is a search, but not by firefighters. The destruction is too serious, the area is almost inaccessible. Dogs from the German Red Cross rescue squadron take on the task. They sniff their way through the rubble. Luckily they didn’t find anything.
Hotel guests who register all tell the same, terrible stories, horror-like stories, distinguishable only in details. “You could see the whole thing was falling apart,” said one young man. The pool was sixteen meters high and the amount of water could have filled 5,000 bathtubs.
Another man says he left the hotel at six to smoke. “I had already seen that the beautiful aquarium was gone.” The police were in front of the hotel. A return to the hotel was not allowed. But there was no alarm.
A politician is woken up by a bang
The FPD member of parliament Sandra Weeser says she was in a deep sleep and then woke up suddenly. You first thought of an earthquake or something similar. There was a short bang and “a short tremor in the building”. She then fell asleep again. She found out what happened from the media. The police and fire brigade would then have informed the guests.
The hotel looks a bit like a war zone. It’s a picture of devastation with lots of dead fish and shards. “Those who might have been saved were frozen to death.”
A catastrophe, a tragedy”
A young woman who has often visited the Aquadome
But a few fish from the Aquadom survived. André Baumann, the head of operations for the fire brigade, said in the early afternoon that surviving fish were found in a water bowl on the elevator.
No cars were damaged in the underground garage
Of course, water also ran into the hotel’s underground car park. When the fire department got the alarm, nobody knew how severe the damage would be. “The underground car park has several basement levels,” says fire department spokesman Wentzel. “But then we found that cars weren’t damaged, the water level wasn’t high enough.”
Water also poured out of a side entrance to the hotel, into a passage between the hotel and another complex. Chairs and tables are now neatly lined up there. A few hours earlier it looked very different. A police officer took a picture with his cell phone. He shows the photos on his smartphone. In the pictures, the chairs and tables are all jumbled up.
A woman was in the Auqadom two months ago
Ulrike Bömmie is also standing behind a red and white warning tape that the police have drawn widely around the rubble field, holding her little son Julius by the hand. She looks at the scene with a touch of bewilderment. “It’s sad,” she says. “Two months ago I was still with him in the Auqadom myself.” She means Julius. “We really liked the whole thing.”
Ulrike Bömmie discovered the scene of the accident by accident. She actually lives in Adlershof, she was at Alexanderplatz for a doctor’s appointment. And because Julius is such a big firefighter fan, he was drawn to the flashing lights and red fire engines he spotted on the street. The mother went with me. Only on site did she find out the reason for the large-scale operation.
A few meters away, another young woman follows the clean-up work. She lives nearby and has frequented the Aquadome. “It’s a disaster,” she says. Her scarf is wrapped around her neck and she is wrapped in a long, dark winter coat. It’s damn cold if you don’t move for a while. “A tragedy,” she then adds quietly. “They also took care of species protection.” But she was also fascinated by the architecture of the Aquadom. One wonders how it works that such an elevator goes up in the middle of the aquarium.”
A structural engineer checks the cracks in ceilings and walls
An employee of the German Red Cross appears in front of her, on a leash a collie from the dog rescue squadron. The use of the animals is over, the collie is heaved into its box in the DRK delivery van. A loud whimper echoes down the sidewalk.
And somewhere in the hotel there is now a structural engineer who examines the building. “We saw cracks in the ceilings and walls,” says fire department spokesman Wentzel, “the structural engineer has to check whether the building is even in danger of collapsing.”
In the meantime, a young woman, shivering from the cold, appeared to a police officer on Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse. She, too, was staying at the hotel but wasn’t in the building when the bang came. The officer shows her the way to the folding table. But before she can be registered, she has to get rid of a bitter message, almost sobbing: “My clothes, my money, everything in the hotel.” But the hotel is closed.