From an engineering perspective these sorts of acrylic tanks are a nightmare to ensure they are safe. The seams are impossible to inspect rigorously so the only real way of checking that they are safe is to load them with an excess pressure ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrostatic_test ). This can't be done with a tank of this size so the engineers can only real fall back on giving the tank excessive safety margins. But those safety margins cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for a tank this big so maybe they were reduced.
All it takes is one incorrect application of a seam bond and a small crack will form. The crack may take decades to propagate with no way of detecting it. When the seam opens up a bit the crack will then propagate the entire length of the seam extremely rapidly and the whole tank will fail. Ideally failures would be slow and predictable but this is impossible with acrylic.
I just saw a documentary (in German) from 2003 about its construction. There is an interview with a guy from the American (Colorado) company which built the tank who boasted that only two companies in the world could build it and the other one declined because they deemed it impossible. Other interesting facts were:
- 15 segments of acrylic glass
- 12 segments for the outer cylinder, 3 for the inner
- all segments worth 4 million EUR
- 200 wall thickness
- shipped in a steel construction
They did not say it, but from the video it looks like the segments were assembled in at the destination but not in their final location.
EDIT: I misunderstood, looks like the outer cylinder was assembled in-place, the inner one on-site and then lifted inside.
For completeness, here is the video, but it is in German:
> It got a little tricky when taping off the glass envelope with foil to prevent possible cracks. Acrylic glass is a sensitive material that absorbs water over time. If it then dries out too quickly, cracks can appear even in the glass walls, which are up to 20 centimeters thick.
Is there no way to detect cracks or is it just prohibitively expensive to do so?
I know that metal fatigue is a known thing that airlines check for and when they went to carbon fiber they had to develop tools to detect fatigue/cracks.
From my limited knowledge[0], it does not seem like this would be an easy structure to scan for inspection. Acrylic can even used for the wedges that interface between the phased array (or single element) probe [1] because it's very good at not interfering with ultrasounds. Water is also a very good "coupling" material, which makes it even harder to get a useful scan since there would be no "backwall" reflecting back the ultrasounds on the other side of the acrylic.
There are other ways to scan for defects, but I'm mostly familiar with ultrasound phased arrays. Other NDT methods are also hard to use in the field after manufacturing.
[0] I work in NDT (non destructive testing), but I'm not a physics engineer and (work further up the stack from the actual probes/scanners). So this is an approximation, and I might be wrong.
[1] This random link is pretty useful to get an idea I think, but I'll also ask around our inhouse scientists if I get the occasion today!
So it sounds like you'd need something on both sides of the "glass" kind of like this aquarium magnet but much larger/complicated: https://www.amazon.com/JRing-Aquarium-Cleaner-Aquariums-Clea... and slowly move it around the whole tank, repeatedly scanning as it goes.
So I'm going to put it in the "theoretically possible but nobody will do it" category for now. ;)
It's a much harder problem than that. Even if you did not find the crack just before taking the structure into use a crack could develop at any point in time after that and you're definitely not going to be emptying this tank on a regular basis for inspection.
So you either detect it before commissioning or it will eventually fail if there is a flaw.
Acrylic and water have virtually the same index of refraction, so if the crack forms on the wet side of the wall and wicks in water you will not detect it visually.
It forms the basis of some magic tricks involving walking on or supporting things in water. (I say some, the rest are totally magic and you should enjoy them.)
They could have steel bands providing reinforcement which would be just slightly obtrusive at some angles, but boy, now it would have bands and well, it's not an uninterrupted glass [acrylic] cylinder.
The article does, but "the AquaDom was a 25-metre-tall (82 ft) cylindrical acrylic glass aquarium"[0] Turns out that's just poor reporting, they could have been more specific. It was the largest (by volume) acrylic cylindrical aquarium in the world.
Thank you barbegal. Given the height and water volume in this instance, do you consider the people involved took too huge a risk? I do believe acrylic is used in aquaparks and zoo aquatic pools. I skimmed instances of acrylic/water fails. Dare I ask, is acrylic construction a significantly cheaper option to solid alternatives?
There are no real alternatives. Glass has mostly the same bonding issues but is more expensive and heavier. Putting acrylic or glass panels in a steel frame dramatically reduces the probability of failure but you lose the wow factor of having a single sheet of transparent material.
I don't think any installation of this size can be truly safe. It has to be constructed in-situ being too large to transport so you would have to come up with some way of pressure testing the tank in-situ.
Not of this size. Certainly single pieces are used in other applications where safety is even more critical such as submersibles. But manufacturing a tube this big would be impossible.
I guess you could transport it at immense cost. But you'd also need a machine capable of moulding or extruding it this big. Current maximum for plastic pipes is about 3.5m diameter https://www.agru.at/en/applications/agruline/grand-opening-r... so you'd need something which is capable of more than 3 times the diameter.
Ideally it would be extruded diamond, but that technology will not be available until early in the 26th century. Second would be clear aluminum, but again that will not be available for another 150 years.
The entire problem is that acrylic is not plastic enough, so it fails catastrophically. Well, diamond has all the nice features for structure building, but it's even britter than acrylic. So your sci-fi diamond tank would fail in an even more sensational way.
We have clear aluminium already in the form of sapphire glass (Al₂O₃). Presumably you're referring to a means of manufacturing it at a scale suitable for, say, an aquarium?
If you're curious about the design considerations and construction techniques for large aquaria, the standard reference is Stachiw's Handbook of Acrylics for Submersibles, Hyperbaric Chambers, and Aquaria: https://www.bestpub.com/books/product/cid-151.html
Plastics are weird, and examining the wreckage will give a lot of information about the failure mode.
Side note: tractor tire inner tubes make great trampolines. My aunt and uncle run a small farm (one farm over from the farmhouse where my mom was born) and gave us a tractor tire inner tube when I was young, and we jumped on it enough to require several patches throughout the years.
In contrast, my bicycle tires at are 130psi, and while loud, the explosion is minor. I think the amount of air/water/matter escaping is part of the equation, but someone more physics-inclined could probably ascertain to a better degree how this affects the outcome.
Road bike tires go up to 150 or so... but that doesn't really matter, what matters is that the surface here is massive and you need to withstand all of the force evenly or it will go. Even one crack would do it, it's not going to just seep out water but explode along the fracture, much like a popped balloon isn't going to gracefully deflate.
There are now many reports about material fatigue as the primary cause, but I am not so sure. Another article [0] mentioned that the building is currently analyzed by engineers because the firemen found cracks in floors and walls - they are, however, not sure if these cracks were caused by the water, or if they were already there before.
In the latter case, something could be wrong with the building's foundations. I am no expert, but if such a massive aquarium is only slightly tilted to one side, I would expect the forces acting on the glass to be ill-distributed. Material fatigue would then only be a secondary cause.
That's a good guess, but I'd still like to see the final report if and when it is published and whether or not they manage to find the root cause. Likely the differential made the problem worse to the point that something gave but I suspect that there is a deeper underlying cause that made it sensitive to that difference in temperature to begin with. Either a material flaw, an assembly issue or something else.
Seems to me it must have been a salt water tank if it had clownfish, and they are tropical so it's not just exposing the acrylic to constant warm water, but a more realistic marine environment.
In the lab I've chemically tested acrylics that were bullet-resistant at low-cm window thickness. No bullets were used in my phase of the operation, but I was clipping off chips from the exact coupons which had been physically measured beyond the fracture point.
You can tell there's a difference in ductility and brittleness with temperature. Pretty tough stuff regardless.
In the aquarium these are supposed to be very thick-walled acrylic curved panels bonded together.
If the water was maintained warm enough for the reef fish while the ambient air dropped below freezing I don't like that idea. The entire temperature differential being borne by the thickness of the acrylic could mean there are different plastic properties diverging among the inner and outer surfaces of the "glass" panel. This could give rise to stress being concentrated deep within the panel if the transition is not too smooth.
Conditions like this could be recreated if so.
Might have been OK if they had penguins and cold-water fish this time of year.
There are some eye witness accounts about corrosion around the base of the tank. One way in which that could have caused this is because corroded metal takes up more space than the original and this could put point stresses on the acrylic. I haven't seen any engineering drawings (I did try to find some but there are only pretty pictures) so I'm not sure how much effect that would have but keeping the base corrosion free would seem to be an absolute requirement regardless of whether or not it would have a disastrous effect like this. So I will have to wait until the investigators have gone all over this, given the amount of money involved there is bound to be a very thorough investigation and after having seen a couple of aircraft accident investigations conclude with entirely different findings than the first 24 hours of speculation I've learned that to be patient usually pays off.
Those will definitely be interesting, if they are leaked. Let's hope the cameras have a high frame rate because the first couple of frames will be the most interesting with respect to where the failure started and how it propagated.
In the Panama City there is an overhead swimming pool many meters above the restaurant floor. I've dined there a couple of times and never feel quite comfortable with that much water hanging over me supported by a sheet of acrylic.
After this that feeling is likely not going to be any less :)
Zero Hedge is not a reliable source of information. They also tend to push a lot of Russian fake news/propaganda. And of course Putin would love to have a major news item showing how the West’s gas sanctions have harmed the West.
Why would you expect the forces acting on the glass to be ill-distributed if the enclosure were tilted slightly? Water pressure acts hydrostatically. The enclosure appears to have a circular cross section. As long as the tilt is not severe there is no reason to believe anything other than tensile hoop stresses due to equal circumferential loading will develop.
The normal force of the tank wall to the floor will shear across the acrylic if it's not perfectly flat. Pressure outwards is normal to the tank wall relative to the water, but if this force goes diagonally through the floor, that's bad.
If the tank burst due to it shearing off of its base then it is not the glass that has the problem; it’s the connection to the base. This might sound pedantic but the OP said the forces on the GLASS were ill-distributed. The most important part of after the fact disaster analysis from an engineering context is being excruciatingly specific about the performance of structural elements.
I'm glad to hear that you'd agree with me then that a correction saying "there is no glass" would be inappropriate because when someone says glass they mean the clear part of the tank.
This may or may not be your intention, but fyi you are coming off as extremely condescending bordering on /r/iamverysmart level tones.
I'm no expert, but I know that a hot tub on slightly uneven ground has a good possibility of bursting and ruining the tub due to how much stress the water will unevenly put against a side. I don't see why the same underlying reasons wouldn't apply here too.
That all depends on whether the underlying surface is still perfectly flat around the perimeter. If it is not then you get local stress variations that can lead to catastrophic failure.
The seams between the panels are likely also not designed to be loaded that way.
Just the asymmetrical load on the structure could do the trick at a relatively small angle because it might cause the structure to get compressed against something bordering it. This is not a trivial engineering project.
I would expect it's not the tilted slightly that would matter but simply settling after installation - a settling foundation can crack concrete and glass so stresses could change if the foundation of the tank was moving.
Considering there was a hotel lobby under the aquarium, it's actually a miracle that only 2 people were hurt. Too bad for the fish though.
Also, there's a sentiment of "how could this happen, it was only upgraded two years ago?!" in all the articles I have read so far - maybe it happened precisely because of that? But let's see what the investigation will reveal...
as someone who has an aquarium, i'm amazed it didn't happen in the middle of the night. Any time I've had an overflow issue or something, it's always in the middle of the night and my water sensor is blaring
I’m renting a house with three bathrooms. Two of the three toilets, on separate occasions, spontaneously cracked and leaked water. Both happened between 5am and 6am-ish. I was awake for one and heard it, and woke up shortly after the other one happened and found my kitchen flooded. The cracks in the two toilet water tanks were identical. Given the comments about the water temp and lobby temps, I’m guessing that hour and temperature changes could be linked.
I was able to get the owner of the house to see the wisdom of replacing the third toilet water tank.
Yes, it could have been much worse if it had happened at, say, 6PM. Although some hotel lobbies can start to get busy even at that hour (airport hotels, etc).
Most fishtanks have to stay in a pretty narrow range of temperatures or the fish die. A big professional installation like this I expect will have both water heating and water cooling (aircon, but for water).
And in a glass fishtank, the glass is in good thermal contact with the water, but bad thermal contact with the room air - so the glass will end up being at fishtank temperature.
So, unless they had extracted all the fish and turned the tank heating off, I don't think what you say is true.
It's possible that the installation assumed a particular temperature range in the surrounding area. The water was still heated to the proper temperature but because the surrounding air was lower than design parameters allowed, was leaking more heat than designed for, requiring the water heating to work harder. Zero idea if any of that is correct but it shouldn't be ignored as a possibility and is one possibility that could be eliminated very quickly if not true.
That is one eventual first quick assumption by some (mostly nontechnical journalists), but nothing official and confirmed, or you have sources? Otherwise please don't sell this as fact. Knowing the place, it still had heating, so I personally find this also unreasonable.. would only make sense to me if it got to freezing temperatures or below 4°C, but that for sure wasn't the case.. I doubt that place was much colder than at other times, like maybe 2-4 degrees.. but if you have any real details on that this would be welcome.
It's filled with tropical fish, so surely the water would have been at a decent temperature - definitely nowhere near freezing. The thing was in a fancy hotel lobby too (I was there once for an Apple event), I doubt they'd let the place go down to such low temperatures.
And you do have first hand information, that this was the reason, as you speak with such authority of that matter?
Like, you do know that the temperature in that hotel was significantly lower than last year?
I mean, it seems possible, that it was the reason, (even though the water temperature itself hopefully did not change as the fishs do not like that) and the last nights were quite cold in germany, so stress from temperature difference is possible, but before I claim to know something, I wait until I know.
I know people got hurt (and fish died) but all I can think is, this is a hotel lobby, there most certainly IS security camera footage of the failure and subsequent deluge and man do I want to know what that looked like.
There might be legal/liability reasons why they’re not releasing the footage immediately.
Reminds me of the Champlain Towers accident - there were surveillance cameras everywhere, as well as a fire alarm control panel (that was critical to the incident as it would’ve been the one triggering an alarm to prompt everyone to evacuate) but no efforts were made to recover either despite the fire alarm panel checking in with the control centre several times (on battery power, over a mobile phone connection) after the collapse, proving that it was still alive and recoverable.
I guess they worked out that it was better to play dumb and let this evidence go away than recover it and potentially get into more trouble. I suspect it’s the same situation with the aquarium.
> A freestanding cylindrical aquarium housing about 1,500 exotic fish has burst in Berlin, causing a wave of devastation in and around the Sea Life tourist attraction, police have said.
> Glass and other debris were swept out of the DomAquarée complex, which houses a Radisson hotel, a museum, shops and restaurants, as 1m litres of water poured out of the 14-metre-high tank shortly before 6am.
> Operators say the aquarium has the biggest cylindrical tank in the world that contained 1,500 tropical fish of 80 different species before the incident.
> The aquarium, which was last upgraded in 2020, is a big tourist attraction in Berlin. A 10-minute elevator ride through the tank was one of the highlights of the attraction.
That's 1.4 meters per minute, or ~2.3 centimeters per second. The aquarium and the fish in it must have been marvelous to watch, because otherwise even imagining being stuck in an elevator moving at this pace feels terrifyingly boring to think about.
The issue was caused by the forced reduction in heating due to energy sanctions.
The decreased warmth of the lobby caused the aquarium, which was sensitive due to its size and construction, to contract and contort to the point of structural failure.
Too early for an official RCA, but the surrounding facts of the known temperature sensitivity of the aquarium, the energy reduction mandates in Berlin, and the unusual cold point to that as the most likely cause.
This poster on Zerohedge provides more details:
I am directly involved in the legal cleanup of this and can provide a little more detail as to what actually happened (Tyler, reach out to me you have my email if you'd like to verify my identity here).
The city of Berlin required the hotel reduce the ambient temperature of the hotel lobby to save on energy due to sanctions. Its been abnormally cold in Berlin the past few nights dipping down to -11°C last night and -12°C the night before that. The water is heated to a constant temperature above 30°C for many of the fish species that lived in the tank.
As the nights got colder and colder, the lower ambient temperature of the air surrounding the tank likely started causing deformations and hairline cracks in the bottom of the tank where the pressure is the greatest. Last night at -11° caused the ambient temperature to drop too low given the reduced heating in the lobby and is what it looks like caused the "sudden unintentional disassembly"/catastrophic failure of the tank.
Everyone is already lawyering up including the city, the HVAC manufacturer, tank manufacturer, HVAC installer, building engineer, hotel - the litigation is going to be fun to watch and work on.
What isn't covered in the news is damage. The tank in 2003 cost €13 million. Today its orders of magnitude more expensive to replace, some of the fish were quite exotic and are expensive losses in and of themselves. Then you have the damage to the hotel lobby and façade, electrical components of the building in the three-story basement are also effected and large amounts of water went into the parking garage where many vehicles are parked not only from the hotel and offices but from an attached apartment complex to the hotel.
Losses are tens of millions. All because the city made the hotel turn down the heat.
2011 - Nord Stream gas pipeline opens, 2022 - the world's largest acrylic aquarium in Berlin disintegrates due to the sanctions. What a beautiful butterfly effect... I'm afraid we'll see more of similar incidents in the coming months...
> All because the city made the hotel turn down the heat.
That's a little bit early to start aiming at the city, isn't it? The call to reduce energy consumption is, if anything, coming on as a case of too little, too late if anything given the ongoing crisis over here; it is altogether a reasonable thing to do. As is always the case in Germany with such things, there will be maddening array of if/then/otherwise escape hatches that is part of those rules, and, frankly, if the management of the hotel and the people responsible for the aquarium had been in the know that keeping a constant temperature in the lobby was essential to the structural integrity of the aquarium and they still lowered it, they're mad. If they weren't told they can't be held responsible. If the manufacturer did know or should have known, they'll be in (sorry) hot water.
All of this is conjecture at his point so phrases like "all because the city told them to turn down the heat" have to be understood in the conjunctive or, better, be explicitly written in that voice.
The writer pretty clearly has an axe to grind with the city, the sanctions, the war, and a lot more (read some of his other comments). His conclusions might turn out to be true, but I don't think he cares if they are or not.
Also, the guy uses the "Reichsflagge" as his user picture, which is a pretty sure indicator of him either being one, or at least sympathizing with, right-wing nutjobs. These people are very quickly jumping to conclusions that fit into their irrationally-distorted picture of the world. And very bad at accepting even obvious facts that counter their worldview.
Yes, that is widely reported now as a very preliminary cause. Also that it has been completely modernized in 2020. Here is a promotional video of the renovation activities:
https://vimeo.com/530397162
Fatigue from what? It's a stationary object housed indoors, not a car or plane that goes through several climatical, temperature and environmental changes to cause fatigue.
Unless they were subjecting the tank to draining and filling cycles often, it seems more like a design/build fault that was a ticking time bomb from the start.
I'm no engineer but this would be static fatigue[1], no?
"[S]tatic fatigue occurs during prolonged and constant application of stress" (my emphasis) - much like the glass/acrylic at the bottom of a 14m high, 1M litre water column, say.
Settlement of the building it's housed in, temperature variations (things contract and expand as temperature changes), random impacts and vibrations (e.g., road traffic, heavy construction nearby), and so on. All of these contribute to fatigue.
A tropical aquarium is keep at the same temperature. Unless somebody would disconnect it to save energy or the termostat[s] would fall, shouldn't have experienced a lot of changes in their volume by this.
Not so much. A big mass of water act as a temperature buffer and air pumps and filters are mixing the water column all the time. It takes several hours to cool.
The event does not seemed truly random to me. If it was, the probability of breaking in the 90% of the time when there was people around would be much higher than breaking in the 10% small time interval without people. Extreme luck is rare. Looking for an external trigger seems appropriate
But the only surface really accessible to people was the escalator, and now we know that it didn't broke. The outer surface is mounted over the escalator door, can't be scratched purposely without taking a lot of troubles. Can't be shoot without leaving evident marks of a crime
If we assume that the thermostat didn't broke and that material fatigue is not an optimum explanation (it was checked and maintained in 2020), then temperature differences seem a good candidate. It broke in winter, in the hour where day/night differences should be maximum. The outer temperatures that night were -10C if I'm not wrong.
Maybe the insurance companies could sue the government if this was indeed the case. I would really like to see the bad policy makers go to jail or get hit with huge fines.
The aquarium was likely very constant (otherwise the fish would die, they tend to be extremely sensitive to variations, especially rate of change), but the surrounding air likely was not.
Those fishes can stand an interval of temperature if changed slowly. A main question to check would be if the thermostat was deliberately lowered by the owner in the previous weeks to save energy
The earth you live on is not solid, more like a squishy orange. When you build a heavy building on it, the building can sink further.
Buildings themselves are subject to the dynamic loads of temperature, wind, their occupants square dancing, and more.
Sometimes unexpected loads are added. A new highway or building built into a rock layer near it can subject the previous building to vibration and other forces and cause damages.
This, and it's in particular true for this very part of Berlin, a city that is well known for literally having been "built on sand", see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palast_der_Republik#Abriss_zwi... which is about the demolition of the comparatively big building of the Palast der Republik which was just across the street on the other side of the river. That building had to be carefully and slowly dismantled to avoid sudden changes in the hydrogeological (?) equilibrium of the load-bearing layers.
Given that amateur seismic stations located 8 and 14 km away from the location were able to pick up a signal from the event[1] of a 1000 tons of water falling to the ground from a height of ~ 2 to 15m, one should image the building itself should have had some sort of influence to its immediate surroundings.
Sand is - strangely enough - quite stable. Clay, peat and lots of other substrates are a lot less stable than sand and when building on them you need to take all kinds of precautions to ensure your foundation doesn't one day go for a walk.
If the engineers didn't know it would fail in 20 years from material fatigue, that's something that should be learned.
They may be blameless by any reasonable standard, but knowing how/when something will reach end of life is an important part of design. We learned a similar lesson with airplanes.
20 years is a very long time for a structure under such extreme stress. You can bet that this accident will influence all such designs and cause a structural review of every other large tank made of acrylic in the world, as well as various under water tunnels in large aquaria.
I stayed at the Radisson in 2019 for ICFP and was astounded at the poor quality of the building, which was undergoing renovations at the time. I distinctly remember noticing visible corrosion around the foundation of the tank structure.
I can confirm it was a great place to visit. I went there 2018 even as a Berlin native. The highlight of the tour was taking the elevator into that water dome. Impressive stuff.
Too sad it’s destroyed - hope insurance will cover all the damage. I wouldn’t want to switch places with the owner currently…
Weird. Earlier today I awoke from a nap after strange dreams and attempted to produce images in midjourney of a giant aquarium breaking. I must psychic or something.
It's Midjourney. It has me wandering the uncanny valley for hours every day, there is so much undiscovered country. My sleep is disrupted. I'm in an altered state and I'm more tuned to recognizing coincidences and generally making associations between images that may or may not be floating around in the latent space.
Case in point - yesterday morning she told me about a vivid dream of a major apartment fire she had. Look what just happened in Lyon [0].
You could dream about a fire for any reason, and fires are unfortunately common enough to at least make local news so unconsciously scanning a headline during the day may plant a "dream worm".
But this happens quite often, even for personal things, like details of the birth of our first kid a couple of weeks before the due date, down to the amount and color of hair, the precise time for a natural birth, and the mino complications right after.
It always gives me split second pause because I want to believe ("quantum entanglement" is weird or witchery is real - she's East European after all). But there's almost always a good explanation for the percieved prescience.
You do realise that becoming a 10x dev will mean you're getting underpaid? It's better to become a 0.1x developer so you're sure you're getting the better end of the deal ;).
Speaking as a 10x dev, this is truth. I have felt underpaid most of my career. After 30 years, I don’t give as much at work anymore. I bought a farm and most of my energy goes there instead. I suggest wishing for a healthy balanced life. No happiness comes from being undervalued and underutilized.
In my reading I have read of several such occurrences, and experienced one myself. On 2 Feb 1990 I fell asleep in front of the TV and dreamed I was a journalist in Cape Town, South Africa. There was buzz about a possible speech by F.W. de Klerk in front of Parliament. I was concerned that I needed a snack on the way, and hoped that the gov't would provide donuts. Then I woke up and CNN was nagging me that de Klerk was about to address Parliament. The subject was South Africa transitioning out of apartheid.
I stayed at the hotel this September. My first thought was "oh, my, there is a breakfast area right there on a ground floor, and it is starts buzzing right from 6am!”. Fortunately, the bang happened 20 mins before.
Interestingly, looking at the tank from my room, I never thought about the scenario when it breaks. I thought "engineers must put a lot of extra margin when constructing this". Turned out I was wrong.
I've stayed there as well for two nights a few years ago, it was a great attraction. Really, really large too - a million liters of water, five stories tall or higher, I don't even remember.
That's a real shame only a few fish survived. It's fortunate only two people hurt. That looks nasty from the picture. Maybe next time less brittle acrylic. Off the top of my head a 14 m high tower of water - there would have been approx 20 psi at the bottom of the tank.
Any fish that got flushed out will be lost, they need things to be 'just so'. I once helped clean up at a friends place who had 30 aquariums with thousands of fish after the power went out longer than his UPS could provide it. The mess was sickening. He never had another tank after that and it was his life's passion.
Interesting to think about. On the one hand, it's no different than any of the random stuff that happens to fish in the wild, or wildlife in general. Being killed for no reason at all is the default in nature; humans build societies and civilizations and develop technologies in large part to avoid it.
On the other hand, this feels especially sad for some reason.
We have an industrial unit which has a mice problem. Every time I go to B&Q (home hardware store for non-UK folk) with the intention of buying mice traps, I just can’t push the button. These mice are destroying our stock, but I just cannot do it. I would be a terrible fisherman.
Have you considered outsourcing? To a cat (or cats) or a pest control company. The pest control company will probably check and close off opportunities for mice to enter the unit, which cats won't do, so you might want to consider retaining both options.
Warehouse cats can be nice warehouse companions too (depending on what happens in the unit).
I've had to do some mouse removal work in my forest adjacent home, and it's not pleasant, but neither is having mice around.
We took our cat in, but she absolutely hated it. Then we thought she escaped for a few hours until we found her expertly hiding underneath some machinery.
In Costco they sell this cat food called ‘Maintenance cat’. Maybe we need one of those cats.
Yeah... around here shelters separate out 'barn cats' from 'pet cats', barn cats are tolerant of people but not really socialized to appreciate people. Rather than taking an existing pet cat and putting him or her to work, I'd try adopting a barn cat and putting them to work. Often, barn cats do retire and become pet cats towards the end of their life, if circumstances allow.
Of course, cats can cause a different sort of trouble than mice. :D
To be fair, you have to catch and release most fish in the UK which, whilst annoying for the fish, doesn't seem to do them much harm since there's e.g. a whole bunch of 30y+ old carp that keep getting caught.
You're allowed to keep a certain set of game and sea fish if they're big enough and from the appropriate place.
I'm sorry for your friend's loss and for the lost livestock, but it seem like it was simply a ticking time-bomb.
If your friend had 30 tanks and thousands of fish, they should have had a more involved backup plan that involved a dedicated generator in addition to a UPS. A small generator would have been a tiny fraction of the materials and livestock costs of running a setup like that.
It was the work of a lifetime. Power here has been so reliable that people forget that it can fail, and even though he was somewhat prepared it turned out not to be enough.
Agreed though that it was a ticking time bomb. As for better backup plans: even autostart generators for data centers can fail when you need them most. Backup plans end up with more and more layers until you think you've got it all and then some little oversight will get you. In his case he probably could have done more but that's only because we're looking at it after the failure, for decades it worked.
Most people in cities in the US have never experienced a power failure that lasts longer than an hour or so (and many places have NEVER had one). It's understandable that people don't think much about it.
Though the moment the UPSs hit 50% you might try to run to Home Depot and grab a generator, but by that time they'd all be sold out.
This is crazy. I've been there a few times as the hotel is a popular spot for conferences (likely in part because of the attraction of the aquarium - I wonder if it will continue to be so popular a venue now). The aquarium was absolutely huge, I can't imagine what it must have been like seeing it burst.
Sadly I never availed of the elevator ride through the aquarium.
Just to add context we could be talking easily about more than $100,000 lost only in the fishes. The materials and pumps of the aquarium should be much worse.
After the strange coup try in Germany the last week, I wouldn't discard still that is not another destabilization attempt by some hypothetical agent. Weren't cameras set around the Hotel hall?
> After the strange coup try in Germany the last week, I wouldn't discard still that is not another destabilization attempt by some hypothetical agent.
How would that work? Is this site important enough to destabilize the country?
Only two people injured after a million liter water wave was a miracle. Could have been much worse.
But I'm probably just hypothesizing too much [again] while trying to analyze the case. It just feels strange coupled with the last long chain of strange events happening right now. To be fair, twenty years are a lot of time for an acrylic tank.
Where do you have the year from? The aquarium was opened 2003 after several years of building. And seeing it now, two weeks ago it even had its 19th "birthday". Speak about bad timing.
Not sure about Germany but in the UK the designers would be unlikely to still be liable anymore under the original contract to design this, liability under the contract would be up to 12 years from when the work under the contract was completed. They might be liable in tort for professional negligence but it's much harder to prove that this has occurred especially after 20 years. More likely the company that was under contract to inspect/maintain this will get hammered.
It looks to me as if they're actually a lot of smaller pieces put together, but maybe I see it incorrectly. Maybe one day, architects will stop designing things that are structural liabilities, or engineers actually get to say no to it before construction starts.
I don't understand your comment. Architects did not design this fishtank, engineers did, ones that specialize in such constructions. Whether or not the design was at fault or there were construction or maintenance issues or the tank was modified out-of-spec, whether there was damage due to the recent renovations are all open questions.
Structural engineers take their work very seriously, much more seriously than your typical software person and you can bet that any and all lessons learned from this incident will be incorporated into future designs. They don't just slap stuff together for the laughs and call it a day.
Incredibly unlikely for any part of the structure to have been designed by an architect, most likely a highly specialist subcontractor design item. Our insurance would not cover it and it is illegal for architects to practice without insurance in many EU countries. The closest any architect would get to this is to go to a big fish tank company and say I want a big fish tank with diameter x and height y, can you do it and how much will it be...
Modern sapphire glass (Al₂O₃) is basically transparent aluminium, and it is very strong. Probably way too expensive to make an aquarium out of it, though!
This is an amusing line of inquiry. Sapphire is growing in popularity for microchips. I found a source for single-crystal sapphire ingots... they only go up to 8 inches (~20cm) in diameter, about 60mm long. This tank was about 11 meters in diameter, 25m long. Scaling that up would be quite the project.
I mean, you could probably do chemical vapor deposition, but it wouldn't be a single crystal so what's the point?
I've been there so many times, every time I went to Berlin, sad news.
It looked pretty cool and was a good place to bring people who didn't know Berlin after a visit to the beautiful Pergamonmuseum, which is 5 minutes walk away.
But I went on the elevator only the first time, it was clear that that wasn't a good idea at all.
Water pressure is very high over 60cm tall for a standard glass panel. This is the reason to not have really big home aquariums for hobbyists in the market, unless you build it directly. They grow in surface instead to be taller
I can only imagine the smell. I remember once having a small aquarium as a kid and it had that 'fishy' smell to it. The whole place must smell like that now.
You mean, they put the fish behind glass in a artificial habitat, which apparently was not built well enough to not break. And you still think humans were just well-meaning? How would you feel if someone took you and your family, and put ya all behind glass, for others to watch? Oh, and there will be an elevator going through your new habitat? Still just fine? I told ya, humans are horrible creatures, they dont even see the errors of their own way.
The root cause of this was that the hotel was forced to lower their heat due to energy sanctions. Reduced heat caused the aquarium to contract which contorted the structure, eventually causing the failure.
They're pulling that "info" from the conspiracy theorist website zero hedge.. that it conveniently aligns with that site's support of Putinist Russia should be noted. The German law limits public space heating to 67º which doesn't seem like it should be nearly enough to cause this kind of failure..
Take a large sheet of acrylic, warm it, bend it by warming it and applying pressure. If the circumference is large take multiple ones. Glue ends together, glue in base plug.
I think it could take a little while to come out, but I'm sure they had cameras in the lobby. It did just happen this morning after all. The building's structural integrity is being checked.
Exactly - the security cam footage takes a few days to be released if the company wants it, or a few weeks to leak quietly if they don't.
At 6 AM you're not going to have many people standing around with cell phone cams for it (and anyone around when the giant tank starts making horrible noises would be hopefully smart enough to run for higher ground).
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
HN really needs a European mod to maintain the quality of this board.
I think we're richer for having this type of content, not least because someone has posted elsethread that the early signs point to material fatigue. The system works as far as I can see, and I think we're some way off the front page of HN being flooded by TikToks.
> not least because someone has posted elsethread that the early signs point to material fatigue
I don't mind it being posted here, but to be fair that is just repeating what one politician is saying: "'Of course, the investigation into the cause has not yet been completed, but the first signs point to material fatigue,' said Berlin Interior Senator Iris Spranger (SPD) of the German Press Agency."
Now if someone were to point at some image and explain why that makes them think it was fatigue that would be great.
I don’t know about TikTok, I just know this post was submitted by someone with 50 karma originally pointing to a German radio station news site, in German. It was only changed to the Guardian later, perhaps by a mod.
> What exactly have we learned that’s valuable from this news?
A lot. It depends on your personal preferences.
If you, as me, are interested in building aquariums and, as me, has watched with disbelief a couple of thick glass panes becoming arches by just 50cm of water, the system built and the planning put on it should be awesome enough. This tank worked for 20 years than is more than most hardware.
If you (as many people here) are interested in space and Mars colonization, you need seriously consider learning the art of keeping fishes in huge tanks. Aquaculture skills will be vital to keep a colony out of the earth.
To start, is one of the better methods known to produce quality food fast to keep your people feed. Some fishes are particularly well suited for space travel, and can even travel safely dehydrated in a paper envelope.
Even more important, tanks with aquatic organisms will be basic to recycle the residues in your small city. Water will be precious stuff and higher tanks allow a much better evaporation control.
You don't want one million litters flood happening in your spatial base so there is a big lesson here for us to learn
I mean as long as we're quoting (and breaking) the guidelines:
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
All it takes is one incorrect application of a seam bond and a small crack will form. The crack may take decades to propagate with no way of detecting it. When the seam opens up a bit the crack will then propagate the entire length of the seam extremely rapidly and the whole tank will fail. Ideally failures would be slow and predictable but this is impossible with acrylic.
These sorts of failures have occurred before https://www.plasticstoday.com/materials/when-acrylic-aquariu... and will keep occurring as long as this type of construction is used.