Activists in defense of animal rights held a vigil this Saturday (17) in front of the hotel in Berlin where a giant aquarium exploded and nearly 1,500 fish died.
About 10 demonstrators lined up in front of the Radisson Blu in the center of the German capital in the early afternoon with signs that read: “Fish are friends, not decoration” and “Rest in peace, butterfly fish family”. Protesters placed lighted candles on the sidewalk.
According to a report by the DPA (German Press Agency, in the original acronym), a woman who was talking to the activists began to cry.
“We need to completely rethink the granting of permits that authorize projects like these,” said a spokeswoman for the Animal Defense Party, which organized the vigil. “Countless animals already die just being transported. Is it necessary to have an artificial coral reef in the middle of Berlin?”, she asked.
On Friday (16), the date on which the explosion occurred, the animal defense organization Peta said it planned to file a lawsuit against the hotel that housed the aquarium and demanded that the site build a memorial in honor of the 1,500 animals dead marines.
“Animals do not exist to be exploited as a setting,” the organization said in a statement. 🇧🇷[Esse acidente] should be a wake-up call for people to stop animals being displayed as if they were simply hotel wall decor.”
The reaction was similar to that of several other activists across the globe. Amnesty International Secretary-General Agnès Callamard said the episode was a “metaphor for human arrogance, endless consumerism and thirst for thrills, thirst for excitement, with devastating consequences for other species” in a Twitter post.
Reynolds Polymer Technology, the American company that participated in the construction of the aquarium, sent a team of specialists to Germany to investigate the causes of the incident. “It is too early to determine the factor or factors that led to a crack like this,” the company said in a statement, according to reports in German newspapers Die Welt and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
The cause of the explosion is still unknown, but one of the suspicions of the authorities is that the low temperatures caused cracks in the structure, which ended up giving in to the pressure of the thousand tons of water. There are still suspicions that there was material fatigue.
Two people were injured by shrapnel after the incident, including a Radisson employee. About 350 hotel guests evacuated at the request of emergency crews, who fear structural damage. According to rescuers, on Saturday afternoon there was still five centimeters of water in the hotel’s underground garage.
Marielle Tierney, 46, told Sheet who thought a bomb had fallen near his apartment, next door to the hotel, at the time of the rupture. The American compared the damage from the incident to that of a tsunami, and said that her building’s garage was also flooded, as well as the storage units located underground. “I tried to salvage some of my belongings, but we’ll see,” she said.
AquaDom was closed for renovations in October 2019. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it remained closed for almost three years, until June of this year. According to the company that manages it, the aquarium housed species ranging from clownfish, like the one from the movie “Finding Nemo”, to seahorses, jellyfish and stingrays.
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