BERLIN — A 50-foot-high aquarium burst in a hotel in downtown Berlin on Friday morning, sending hundreds of thousands of gallons of seawater and 1,500 tropical fish through the lobby and onto the street.
The force of the blast and water coursing out of the building pushed mangled debris — from twisted lamps to bellhop trolleys — onto the street in front of the hotel.
About 100 firefighters responded at the scene, cordoning off an intersection close to the hotel, a Radisson, near the central square of Alexanderplatz. The authorities were checking for structural damage to the building as guests were evacuated, and two people were taken to the hospital to treat cuts caused by shards of glass from the burst tank.
Some guests led out of the hotel described a street strewn with dying fish, some of which appeared to have frozen to death by the frigid morning temperatures of 19 degrees Fahrenheit.
The cylindrical tank, called the AquaDom, was built in the hotel in 2003 and holds 264,000 gallons of water. The makers of the AquaDom described it as the largest cylindrical free-standing aquarium in the world.
Municipal officials said that although the fish inside the main cylindrical tank were unlikely to survive, they were working to save fish that were housed in smaller aquariums inside the building. Those fish were also at risk, because the blast shut down the building’s power.
“The fish that have survived are being moved as safely as possible,” said Markus Kamrad, an official at the Berlin Senate. “Our Plan A is to reactivate the electricity. Plan B would be to bring them to a safe location, and we have some offers from places that say they are ready to take them.”
Local news media said that the Berlin Zoological Garden had offered to take in the rescued fish.
Firefighters conducted a search operation with rescue dogs to make sure no people were caught in the deluge, but they said no one was left in the building.
The cause of the aquarium’s collapse was not immediately clear, though local news reports suggested a technical defect was to blame.
A video made by Sandra Weeser, a member of the federal Parliament who was staying at the hotel, showed the wreckage of the giant tank amid mangled debris.
In an interview on local television, Ms. Weeser described waking up to a shock wave that she thought was a small earthquake before falling back asleep. When she got up an hour later, she saw dozens of people and firefighters outside the hotel, and was soon guided out of the building herself.
She said the scene outside the hotel reminded her of a war zone. “It’s a picture of devastation with lots of dead fish and broken shards,” she said, describing dying fish on the sidewalk, including a dead parrot fish. “The ones that might have been saved were frozen to death.”
The tank, in the center of the hotel’s atrium, had a diameter of 38 feet and was wrapped around a glass elevator that allowed visitors to view the sea life inside.
The Berlin Fire Brigade said that most of the water had run onto the streets or into the building’s basements and from there into the building’s sewer system.
