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A few years ago there was a similar story about police being called to a sighting of a giant black panther, reportedly prowling the streets of San Bernardino. What they discovered was a black trash sack left for collection on the sidewalk, that had settled in such a way that, viewed from a considerable distance and by someone with less than 20/20 vision, it could indeed be mistaken for a big cat.
In both cases, the reports were made plausible by the fact that similar things have happened in the past. Very sadly, stillborn and miscarried children have been disposed of as described, and mountain lions showing up in backyards in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains is not uncommon.
Giant aquarium bursts - causing a crash so loud that people thought it was an earthquake
Two people were injured when the glass casing holding at least 1,500 exotic fish crashed into a hotel foyer in Berlin
A giant aquarium containing around 1,500 tropical fish burst inside a Berlin hotel complex on Friday, flooding the lobby and a nearby street and leaving two people injured.
Guests said they were woken by a loud bang as the world's largest freestanding cylindrical aquarium shattered, leaving marine life flowing through the hotel entrance and out onto freezing cold streets in the busy Mitte district.
"A million litres of water and all the fish inside spilled onto the ground floor," a spokesman for the Berlin fire department said.
One guest described seeing a parrot fish frozen dead on the ground after it was expelled from the vast container used as a centrepiece of a leisure complex housing the Radisson Blu hotel, a museum, shops and restaurants.
"There was a slight tremor of the building and my first guess was an earthquake," German lawmaker Sandra Weeser, who was staying at the hotel when the aquarium burst, said.
The area where the aquarium once stood was now just "dark and wet" she said, recalling how she saw "one of those large parrot fish lying on the ground, frozen".
A fire department spokesperson told The Telegraph that the majority of fish have remained inside what's left of the structure, although they are presumed dead.
“A specialist is in the building at the moment testing the structure after that we can go in. Some fish from other tanks could be saved and have been taken to another aquarium."
He said authorities still did not know what caused the incident.
The crash was so large it registered on a seismometer used to record earthquake and volcano tremors.
Two people suffered injuries from glass splinters and had to be hospitalised, a spokesman added.
More than 100 emergency workers were sent to the scene, which was scattered with glass and other debris.
The cylindrical AquaDom, which opened in 2004, was a popular tourist attraction in the German capital.
It is located in the foyer of a Radisson Blu hotel and had a clear-walled elevator built inside to be used by visitors to the Sea Life leisure complex.
Berlin police said on that the incident had caused "incredible maritime damage" with the death of hundreds of fish.
Water was also "massively" leaking onto the adjoining Karl Liebknecht Street, they said, forcing the partial closure of the major traffic artery. Tram service was also suspended.
The area around the complex was sealed off and sniffer dogs were being used to search for possible victims among the devastation.
Pictures and videos circulating online on Friday, apparently from guests staying at the hotel, showed extensive damage to the transparent aquarium, with only the frame still standing.
Bits of broken window panes and damaged furniture were scattered all around.
"I was woken by a loud bang," Andi, who lives in a penthouse at the back of the hotel, told the Telegraph.
"The whole building vibrated and you heard the twisting of metal."
"I thought the ferris wheel had collapsed," he said, pointing across the street at a nearby Christmas market.
"It was only when I looked down in the morning and saw the mess that I knew what had happened."
"All of our cellars are swamped with water now. I'm worried that the whole structure of the building is damaged."
Christian and his wife were two of about 350 guests in the hotel. He said: "We heard a loud crack. We then woke up. My wife said something flew past the window. (...) I got up shortly afterwards and saw that the aquarium, which was still standing yesterday and had been beautifully cleaned from the inside, had collapsed."
Musician Iva Yudinski to BILD: "Early in the morning, around 6 o'clock, I heard a huge explosion, a bang. I didn't understand what happened at all. I called my friend and went to her room. From there we saw the aquarium and all the destruction. Everything is flooded with water."
The hotel has been evacuated and guests were offered shelter in heated buses amid freezing early morning temperatures, the fire service spokesman said.
A drone was being used to survey the extent of the destruction, he added.
A few years ago there was a similar story about police being called to a sighting of a giant black panther, reportedly prowling the streets of San Bernardino. What they discovered was a black trash sack left for collection on the sidewalk, that had settled in such a way that, viewed from a considerable distance and by someone with less than 20/20 vision, it could indeed be mistaken for a big cat.
In both cases, the reports were made plausible by the fact that similar things have happened in the past. Very sadly, stillborn and miscarried children have been disposed of as described, and mountain lions showing up in backyards in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains is not uncommon.
Yes, this is another typical Berlin story.
The aquarium was constructed of acrylic panels, 41 round pieces glued together. PMMA, not even polycarbonate. WEll known, that acrylic plastic gets brittle over time, if exposed to UV radiation, and thats present with light.
According to local news, a specialist was cited, that it would have been possible to build out of security glass held together with special foils, which would have prevented the accident. But glass is significantly thicker and weighs a lot more (plus, it's greenish tint in thicker diameters), so the construction was made of PMMA (Also for overall cost reasons).
It would be of no surprise to me, if the 2020 checkup report shows warnings about a potential material weakening hazard. In general these are ignored in this city.
I do care for the tropical fish, killed, I do not care for one of these ugly standard hotels that is damaged severely.
The tank was reported to hold a million liters of water: using online conversion sites (sorry, math was never my strong point), it would appear that at room temperature (70 F or 21 C), the water alone weighed 9,980 tons! The stress that must have put on the acrylic container must have been horrendous. I was surprised to read that it was drained in 2020 for a major refurbishment and no-one found any signs of anything amiss. But finding them and ignoring them is not just a Berlin thing. Hammersmith Bridge in London, the Minneapolis Bridge Collapse, and the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse all spring to mind as other examples.
If a documentary is ever made about this, I'd call it Aquarium: The Weight of Water...
The guy's not a professional of any kind, I don't think, but he makes some interesting hypotheses.
In the video, he says that the aquarium tank was situated in a lobby where cold air from outside could blow in and hit the glass tank. The outdoor air temperature, that day, was -9º C and the temperature of the water in the tank was approx +25º C. The walls of the tank were made of tempered glass and were exposed to a large temperature gradient. Combine that with the stress of many metric shit-tons of seawater and you've got a recipe for disaster. When tempered glass breaks, it releases all its tension in fractions of a second. The wave of shattering glass propagates at multiple times the speed of sound, more than twice as fast as a rifle bullet.
People in the building characterized the event like an explosion. If you look at it the way the video proposes, yes, the tank did explode!
Lucky thing that the thing didn't explode just an hour later! It happened at around 5:00 a.m. If it was much later, the lobby might have been full of people. By the Grace of God, nobody was killed and only two people were hurt by flying schrapnel and went to the hospital but, as I understand, they'll be okay.
The fish, however, didn't fare so well. More than a 90% loss!
Interesting. As he points out, the news reports all described the tank as being in the hotel lobby, and didn't mention that this lobby was in fact in an atrium that was open to the elements at each end (the roof and the sides of the two buildings it covered would likely have increased the temperature a bit from outdoors, but to nothing like room temperature). As the temperature in Berlin can range from well below freezing in winter to nudging 30 C / upper 70s to low 80s of F in the summer, you can add two decades of thermal cycling to all the other stresses that the structure was dealing with.
Agreed that the timing of the incident was hugely lucky (for humans). Reminds me of the 1987 "hurricane" in England: if it had happened during the rush hour rather than in the middle of the night, it could easily have killed hundreds. I slept through the whole thing, and the first I knew about it was opening the front door to find that a large oak tree had collapsed onto the road outside, totaling two parked cars in the process.
Have you ever seen a Pyrex baking dish explode when it accidentally gets left on a hot stove top? It happened to my family, one Thanksgiving. My mom was in a hurry and took the dish out of the oven and absent mindedly left it sitting on a hot burner. A minute later, the dish just exploded and shot glass schraplel three feet across the kitchen.
If a 12” x 18” dish can explode that violently, I can only imagine how bad a fifty foot tall tank of seawater would be!
I also know that, if Pyrex gets just a tiny scratch or chip in the surface, it significantly weakens it.
Extend that concept to something the size of a giant aquarium. If some naive tourist or somebody accidentally scratches that glass it could leave a latent flaw that might remain unnoticed for years before it fails.
Another family story…. When I was a kid, my Mom was getting into the car on a winter day. She went to brush some snow from the rear window with her bare hand when her diamond wedding ring made a tiny scratch in the glass. A few minutes later, the rear window exploded into a million pieces. The rear window defogger warmed the glass just enough and that tiny, little scratch caused the whole thing to fail, catastrophically.
I’ve seen small glass items fail. I would not want to be in the same ZIP code when that tank failed!
Tesla ends up in Pasadena pool, family of 3 rescued
Two good Samaritans rescued a 4-year-old boy, his mother and his grandmother after their Tesla crashed through a wall and fell into a backyard pool in Pasadena on Tuesday, Jan. 10.
While firefighters checked the child at the scene as an abundance of caution, no one was hospitalized, city spokeswoman Lisa Derderian said.
It happened around 9 a.m. in the 900 block of West California Boulevard.
The driver had stepped on the accelerator instead of the brake, the Fire Department said.
It was raining at the time, Derderian said.
Two staffers from nearby Pacific Oaks Children’s School came to the aid of the driver and the passengers, jumping into the pool and pulling them out, Derderian said.
The two men, reportedly a teacher and a maintenance man, and school officials couldn’t be reached for comment.
Derderian didn’t think the residents of the house were home at the time of the crash.
The lights have been on at a Massachusetts school for over a year because no one can turn them off
Blame it on the pandemic and "supply chain problems," says the school district's assistant superintendent of finance.
Jan. 19, 2023, 12:00 PM UTC
By Corky Siemaszko
WILBRAHAM, Mass. — For nearly a year and a half, a Massachusetts high school has been lit up around the clock because the district can’t turn off the roughly 7,000 lights in the sprawling building.
The lighting system was installed at Minnechaug Regional High School when it was built over a decade ago and was intended to save money and energy. But ever since the software that runs it failed on Aug. 24, 2021, the lights in the Springfield suburbs school have been on continuously, costing taxpayers a small fortune.
“We are very much aware this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money,” Aaron Osborne, the assistant superintendent of finance at the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District, told NBC News. “And we have been doing everything we can to get this problem solved.”
Osborne said it’s difficult to say how much money it's costing because during the pandemic and in its aftermath, energy costs have fluctuated wildly.
“I would say the net impact is in the thousands of dollars per month on average, but not in the tens of thousands,” Osborne said.
That, in part, is because the high school uses highly efficient fluorescent and LED bulbs, he said. And, when possible, teachers have manually removed bulbs from fixtures in classrooms while staffers have shut off breakers not connected to the main system to douse some of the exterior lights.
Still, having the lights on at Minnechaug all the time is a conspicuous waste of taxpayer money, Wilbraham’s town selectmen said in an Aug. 8, 2022, letter to the members of the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District.
“The image it projects is one of profligacy in a time when many families in the communities the District serves are struggling with their own energy costs,” they wrote.
But there’s hope on the horizon that the lights at Minnechaug will soon be dimmed.
Paul Mustone, president of the Reflex Lighting Group, said the parts they need to replace the system at the school have finally arrived from the factory in China and they expect to do the installation over the February break.
“And yes, there will be a remote override switch so this won’t happen again,” said Mustone, whose company has been in business for more than 40 years.
Minnechaug is the only high school in its district and serves 1,200 students from the towns of Wilbraham and Hampden. The original high school building, which dates back to 1959, was replaced with the current 248,000-square foot structure in 2012.
One of the cost-saving measures the school board insisted on was a “green lighting system” run on software installed by a company called 5th Light to control the lights in the building. The system was designed to save energy — and thus save money — by automatically adjusting the lights as needed.
But in August 2021, staffers at the school noticed that the lights were not dimming in the daytime and burning brightly through the night.
“The lighting system went into default,” said Osborne. “And the default position for the lighting system is for the lights to be on.”
Osborne said they immediately reached out to the original installer of the system only to discover that the company had changed hands several times since the high school was built. When they finally tracked down the current owner of the company, Reflex Lighting, several more weeks went by before the company was able to find somebody familiar with the high school’s lighting system, he said.
In the meantime, Lilli DiGrande, who is now a 16-year-old junior and a co-editor of The Smoke Signal, the online high school newspaper, published an article on Nov. 3, 2021, with the headline “What’s Wrong With The Lights?”
Lilli DiGrande wrote a story about the lights for the school's news site in November 2021. Matt Nighswander / NBC News “The teachers were complaining because they couldn’t dim the lights to show videos and movies on the whiteboard,” DiGrande told NBC News. “The teachers now try to get around it by unscrewing light bulbs. But the lights seem to be on everywhere in the school.”
Soon, Wilbraham’s town selectmen began hearing complaints from residents.
“The Board of Selectmen members have received, and continue to receive, complaints regarding the lights being left on at night at Minnechaug Regional High School,” they wrote in their Aug. 8, 2022, letter. “The lights that are being referred to are the classroom lights, not the outdoor lights. There is a significant amount of concern expressed by citizens that this is a waste of energy and, in turn, taxpayer dollars.”
The town leaders added that “this issue may be one of lesser cost or importance in the overall operation of the District, but it is, unfortunately, a visible one.”
Osborne, along with Schools Superintendent John Provost, assured the town leaders they had been working on the problem.
“After many weeks of effort, we were provided a rough estimate in excess of $1.2 Million to comparably replace the entire system,” Osborne and Provost wrote in an Aug. 26, 2022, response.
That estimate was from Reflex Lighting, Osborne told NBC News.
But with the pandemic raging, the contractor would not have been able to start doing the job until the following summer, Osborne said.
So Osborne and Provost, in their letter to town leaders, wrote that they hired a software consultant to see if it would be possible to “patch the system” to override the default system. And when that proved unworkable, they explored the possibility of having simple timers installed or even an on/off switch.
Matt Nighswander / NBC News “This was eventually deemed not possible and the district moved on to looking at physical solutions that would retain some of the energy-saving intent of the original lighting management system,” Osborne and Provost wrote in their response.
Osborne said they had no choice but to go back to Reflex Lighting and, with the help of the company’s electrical engineers, they came up with what he described as a “piecemeal” approach to solving the problem by replacing the server, the lighting control boards and other hardware.
In November 2021, the parts were ordered and the repair job was supposed to start in February 2022.
But the replacement main server wasn’t delivered to Wilbraham until March 2022, which Osborne and Provost described in their letter to town leaders as “relatively on schedule.”
“It was very frustrating, but we were dealing with the pandemic and supply chain issues,” Osborne said.
Osborne and Provost also reported that “the remaining equipment has been back ordered multiple times” and the district was given a new delivery date of Oct. 14, 2022.
“While we are hopeful this will be met, we are of course skeptical,” they wrote. “So, for now, the lights are stuck on.”
It turned out they were right to be skeptical.
The Christmas 2022 season came and went and the replacement parts were not delivered and the lights remained on at Minnechaug.
Holiday decorations at Minnechaug Regional High School.Matt Nighswander / NBC News
“The final lighting system transition did not happen over break as expected because our vendor contacted us on the last day school was in session to reschedule the transition work,” Osborne said in a subsequent Jan. 3 letter to the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School Committee. “This was surprising and disappointing to us: we had this date locked with Reflex since October.”
Now, Osborne said, “we’re not expecting them to come until February, but we are pushing to do it sooner.”
But he's confident that waiting it out was the right decision.
“We could have accepted the $1.2 million bid to rip the system out and start over right away, but I suspect we would find ourselves in the same position,” he said. “As I see it, there wasn’t an alternative.”
Mustone said the pandemic essentially shut down the factories in China that produce the components they need to do this kind of work. He said it’s a lot cheaper to build things over there, but lots of American companies like his are now paying the price.
“I have been doing this for 42 years and I have never seen this kind of supply chain disruption,” he said. “We made a deal with the devil by moving the factories to China.”
The lights have been on at a Massachusetts school for over a year because no one can turn them off
I heard about this story on the radio last night. In the early 2000's, I worked in a building that put in some sort
of remote energy management system, and after hours, all the lights would automatically shut off, except for
a bare minimum of safety lighting in the halls & offices. if I wanted to stay late or come in and do some work
after the building was closed for the day, I had to call somebody in St Louis to turn the lights on, ( ! ) and
either give them an estimate of how long I was going to be in the building, or call them back before I left
& have them turn the lites off.
After about a year of doing this, the system was changed to where motion detectors were put in some
parts of the building, and in other parts of the building, there was a swtchplate with a button you could
push which would turn the lights on in that area for an hour- - although we discovered that you could
push it several times & get a maximum of 3hrs of light before having to push it again.
More recently, I worked in a screening room where there was a water fountain that ran for over a year
because nobody could find the valve to shut it off. (No, it wasn't behind the fountain- - I looked)
It's surprising how basic building management stuff can slip through the cracks like this. It usually happens because it is one person's responsibility to do something (e.g. power down the building at the end of the day as the original architects designed), that person leaves under, shall we say, difficult circumstances, and there is no formal handover.
Example - I once worked for a small chain of arthouses in England, and was sent to another site over a weekend on an emergency basis, after the chief had been fired. He had been making unwelcome advances to female staff members, which eventually progressed to the level of serious harassment. Immediately he left, they found kiddie porn in the booth (this was in the days when it was on paper) and the police got involved. This was a single screen changeover house, and he'd basically worked seven days a week, with just the odd relief coming in on days when he was sick or on vacation. There was no other projectionist on the permanent staff. So when he was fired, and then very shortly after arrested, that place was in big trouble.
One of the things I found was that he'd been leaving the projector lamps on 24/7. I have no idea why on earth he would do that: all I know is that per the chart on the back of the lamphouse, they were changed a month prior and had already done around 1,400 hours. The managers confirmed that he was ordering new lamps every 2-3 months when, given the usage pattern at that site, it should have been more like every 5-6. There were DTS readers on top of the projectors, which appeared never to have been used. No discs were being delivered with the prints. They had long been complaining that the auditorium had been getting hot and stuffy, in response to which the ex-chief told them that theaters built in the 1930s just got like that, and that nothing could be done. Checking things out, I found that every single belt in all the air handling units had worn out and broken. Replacing them fixed that problem. I found several other issues like that, too.
Presumably he had taken over from someone else, no basic building management knowledge had been passed along, and his own lack of training and initiative had prevented him from figuring this stuff out himself.
I get the impression that this school is just mesmerized by the technology.
Wikipedia says they have 7000 lights but I'm sure a lot of them are ganged. All of the lights in the second floor ladies bathroom would likely come on at once; there would be no need to individually control the light over each stall.
Aside from the above mentioned fascination, wouldn't it be cheaper and future-proof to rip out that fancy control system and rewire it with standard light switches and an electrical panel? That quoted cost for replacing their system works out to $171.43 per light fixture, which seems like a lot of money to me, not to mention the ongoing excessive amounts being paid for power to light a building around the clock when it's unoccupied for most of the day.
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