Prosecutors in Berlin have closed their investigation into the giant AquaDom cylinder aquarium collapse, concluding that the cause could not be pinpointed and that they had no lead to follow on who might be responsible.
According to the Associated Press, engineer Christen Bonten submitted a report after being commissioned by the building’s owners to find out exactly what went wrong, and who, if anyone was to blame. Bonten presented three theories on why the walls of the one million-liter aquarium suddenly gave way in the early hours of December last year.
He hypothesized that firstly, the aquarium’s adhesive seam may have failed. Secondly, the tank may have been damaged by a dent in its base when the aquarium was modernized in 2020. And thirdly, the tank may have been refilled too late after that modernization, drying out the acrylic glass walls too much. He concluded however that there was no clear evidence to prove any of them. The prosecutors added that there had never been any suspicion of a deliberate act.
The twenty-year-old saltwater cylinder aquarium resided in a hotel lobby in Berlin, Germany, before its spectacular collapse nearly a year ago. Without warning, the tank gave way and released 264,000 gallons of water (1100 tons,) into the hotel lobby and out into the street below. Two people suffered minor injuries and it’s a miracle that no one was seriously hurt or killed. It happened in the early hours of the morning before the usually busy lobby filled up with people and became a hive of activity.
The commercial aquarium manufacturing industry collectively held its breath when news of the disaster broke. The tank was old, it had a lift installed through the center of it as a visitor attraction in recent years, and the explosion of 1100 tons of water could have caused mass human fatalities. Most (but not all,) of the display’s fish died in the accident. Such events are bad for the public aquarium sector as developers wanting to add the watery wow factor to their buildings may just think twice about installing such attractions in the future.
There are no plans to rebuild the AquaDom.
Main picture credit Cory Doctorow from London, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
