I thought I’d lighten things up a bit for a Friday evening and I found this whopper of a fish story to share.

As fish tanks go, I’m not kidding – it was a whopper.

A huge aquarium in Berlin burst early on Friday, spilling 1 million litres (264,172 gallons) of water, around 1,500 exotic fish and debris onto a major road in the busy Mitte district, emergency services said.

Around 100 emergency responders rushed to the site, a leisure complex that houses a Radisson hotel and a museum as well as what Sea Life Berlin said was the world’s largest freestanding cylindrical aquarium at 14 metres (46ft) in height.

“It felt like an earthquake” said Naz Masraff, who had been staying at the hotel.

I’ll bet it felt like an earthquake. If you were anywhere near the lobby when it blew, with that much water bursting out?

KOWABUNGA

What an absolute miracle it happened early in the morning.

…“If this hadn’t happened at 5:45 am but even just one hour later, then we would probably have had terrible human loss to report,” broadcaster RBB cited Giffey as saying.

An eight-story high glass tower filled with a million liters of water and 1500 fishies blows apart in a hotel lobby…and only two people are hurt by flying glass? Astonishing.

…The Mayor of Berlin Franziska Giffey went to the hotel to see the damage and described the tank burst as being like a tsunami.

She expressed relief it had happened so early in the morning – saying an hour or so later, and the lobby and street outside would have been busy with visitors, many of them children.

Sandra Weeser, a member of the German federal parliament who had been staying at the hotel, told local television that she had been woken up by “a kind of shock wave” and described the scene outside the hotel as a “picture of devastation”.

Of course, this big badda boom is newsworthy in itself, however.

I would like to draw your attention to a couple of interesting tidbits scattered through the different news reports that tie back into my earlier post this afternoon – on the desperate state of the German energy grid.

Cogitate on these observations for a minute.

…She said fish which may have been saved had frozen to death and recalled seeing a “large parrotfish lying on the ground, frozen“.

“Frozen“? Excuse me, what? The tank was in the lobby of a hotel, wasn’t it?

There’s more.

…A police source told local media there is no evidence the break was the result of a targeted attack.

But there has been speculation that freezing temperature – which dropped as low as -6C overnight – may have caused a crack in the tank.

Were they not heating the lobby of the Radisson, even to keep it above freezing? I mean, that’s amazing if they weren’t. I can only imagine it would be because of cost-saving measures or maybe even government-mandated restrictions on commercial energy use.

Then again, I did some image digging to see if I could see a roof on the lobby itself, and, yes – the entire lobby has a roof structure, which they light up dramatically after dark. I still could not conceive of a glass fish tank being in the open, and, as well, not having its own heating system to compensate for the weather at the location. That lobby, for the fishies to freeze, had to be damn cold, to begin with.

Our piscine friends are pretty delicate, cranky creatures based on the…um…numbers of them I’ve unintentionally murdered in fish tanks over the years at home. They like a stable environment.

-6°C is 21°F so it was well below freezing and almost 10°F under Berlin’s average mid-December lows.

I have a feeling Germany is going to be miserable this year.

Travel note: If you’re going to Europe, make sure there’s a roof on the lobby of your hotel if there’s any kind of fish tank.

Or ask for extra towels at the desk.