The collossal 265,000-gallon saltwater aquarium in the lobby of Berlin's Radisson Blu hotel burst Friday morning at about 5:30 a.m., flooding the lobby with water, glass and thousands of doomed aquatic creatures. The building was evacuated, and no humans are reported injured in what could have been a mass-casualty event had it happened an hour or two later.
"It was a full-on tsunami," Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey said, calling it mere luck that the aquarium came apart in the early hours of the day, when there weren't many people around. "Despite the terrible destruction we're seeing, we're lucky people weren't seriously injured."
She added that the aquarium's saltwater inhabitants, however, "could not be saved."
The police said there was no indication of sabotage or any attack on the aquarium, and the cause of the failure remained unclear.