11 ms·

20M historical artifacts destroyed in Brazil National Museum fire

236 points by emersonrsantos 8y ago

skookumchuck 8y ago
Concentrating irreplaceable artifacts in a museum just magnifies the probability of losing them all.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  Especially storing them in a building made of flammable materials (which have not been treated to retard flames), or in a flood plain, or a tornado zone, the foot of a volcano...
- kartan 8y ago
  Yes. It's convenience and cost vs risk.
- haney 8y ago
  Keeping them in lots of separate places just magnifies the probability of the public not being able to view them.
  - natch 8y ago
    But maybe only centralize them when you can provide reasonable assurance of the safety of the items. In the meantime, place them with more secure facilities for safekeeping. I think national pride gets in the way, though.
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      Securing and protecting many small facilities is going to cost more than doing so for one facility and impinges on the reasons for gathering artefacts - study, education, etc..
  - natch 8y ago
    I think the probability of public viewing is down to zero now, so that didn’t work out so well, did it?
  - wruza 8y ago
    Now it is zero though.
  - ztjio 8y ago
    A single museum could be broken into many smaller buildings, with measures taken specifically to avoid spreading fires and things like earthquake damage from one building to another. Decentralization doesn't have to mean spreading things miles apart.
    - skookumchuck 8y ago
      Exactly. If you visit Mt Vernon (Washington's home), the kitchen is in a separate building. It seems odd, until the guide tells you that kitchen fires were common, and so the kitchens were separated from the main house.
  - ZenPsycho 8y ago
    Usually the public viewing areas are limited in space. The bulk of a 20 million artefact collection would have to be kept in more recently built warehouses, possibly underground, and kept near by the main museum. In the event of a fire they can be sealed and filled with argon gas, exactly the same as any highly sensitive data centre, such as for instance, the IRS data centre, or the stock market. Funding for such things should have been a no brainer considering the high potential economic value of these objects. The Brazilian government should have thought of this building as though it's a bank, because it basically is, if you consider that the museum could have decided to, for instance, sell off most of the collection if it decided to, and have ended up well ahead of losing essentially billions of dollars.
    - MattBlissett 8y ago
      > The bulk of a 20 million artefact collection would have to be kept in more recently built warehouses That's not often the case. These museums were built to house these collections, and often include rooms full of drawers, compacting shelving etc with the collected objects. This incudes the basement, but not only the basement. For example, the Natural History Museum in London has "the majority" of their 80 million specimens stored in the museum in London. You may be able to go on a behind-the-scenes tour of your local museum.
- knlinux 8y ago
  That's not true and what they did was probably optimal. The probability of losing the whole collection over time is the same. By spreading collections around into N locations, you would have, on average, N times more fires like this one, but fire would be engulfing a smaller collection at a time (1/N). Moreover, by having it centralized you can reduce costs, hence save money and use it to lower the risk of fire. What they did by centralizing the collection was the best thing they could do to save it, but apparently they didn't even have money to protect a single museum from fire hazard. Spread the collection around the country and you don't even have money/people for proper maintenance and protection against theft in each individual location.
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    That would only be true if the risk of fire is evenly distributed, which it obviously isn't, and that a museum burning down now and then would not motivate better protections for the rest. In any case, the strategy they chose obviously didn't work and they lost it 100%.
    - knlinux 8y ago
      It probably isn’t but it’s safe to assume that this location was at least around the median in terms of fire risk (this location had probably better infrastructure than the average Brazilian city), so the fact that there might be less risky locations doesn’t change much since you’ll then have places with higher risk, where the collection will have burned down even sooner. Even if you knew the best location with the least hazard, optimally you would still want to move all collections there anyway. The strategy didn’t work since any strategy was likely deemed for failure due lack of funding, not because it was suboptimal.
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    > By spreading collections around into N locations, you would have, on average, N times more fires like this one, but fire would be engulfing a smaller collection at a time (1/N) If the likelihood of a fire starting in a non-residential building is roughly proportional to the square footage of the building, then you'd have roughly the same total number of fires across all buildings but 1/N of the collection destroyed each time.
Firerouge 8y ago
Surely a 5.5Ton meteorite could survive the heat off a building fire... Right? The director's statement that everything has been lost seems rather pessimistic. There must be some sort of digital catalog of what was present in the museum that'll preserve it in some form.
- danso 8y ago
  The museum was reportedly in disrepair from lack of funds and appears to have a non-effective fire suppression system. I don’t think it’s a given that it had a robust digital archive. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/03/fire-engulfs-brazil-national-museum-rio https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/03/fire-engulfs-b...
  - ericdykstra 8y ago
    Millions of priceless artifacts destroyed due to negligence by Brazil and all of the museums that loaned artifacts to a museum that didn't care to protect them.
    - samstave 8y ago
      How are we to know that the fire isnt a cover for a massive heist?
      - alister 8y ago
        Talking about museum heists in Rio, I went to see the Museu da Chácara do Céu -- an art museum hidden away on a mountain top -- because they had a Dalí, a Picasso, a Monet, and a Matisse according to a guidebook. I didn't see any of them. The front desk told me that they were all taken in a heist. They had a poster offering a surprisingly low R$5000 reward, about US$1250, for their recovery.
  - MattBlissett 8y ago
    We have records of almost 270,000 preserved animal and plant specimens, for example leaves/flowers dried and pressed or whole insects most likely pinned down into a drawer. This is still useful data, for example knowing that a species used to be present in a particular area, but if a specimen is destroyed then in the absence of a photograph of the specimen (and sometimes that's not enough) the original assertion can no longer be verified. https://www.gbif.org/publisher/4205110f-3f0f-40d8-bd0f-2fa71bc827b5 https://www.gbif.org/publisher/4205110f-3f0f-40d8-bd0f-2fa71... (I work at GBIF, so I know this data exists, but otherwise I know nothing more than the article covers. I do not know what proportion of the total biodiversity collection 270,000 is, whether they were stored in this building, or whether there are images of them. As one example, they estimate 550,000 plant specimens, but share data of 42,000. That might well mean it isn't electronic, or it might mean it exists in a database but isn't yet shared as open data.)
revskill 8y ago
We need a way to convert back-forth real thing <-> digital things. Then we could backup everything on Earth and move to the Moon, or Mars, for example. It's the only way to move our stuffs any where we want.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
  DPC & PDC. Digital-Physical Converter, Physical-Digital Converter. Sounds like a good choice of terminology for a new Sci-Fi book.
  - Jedi72 8y ago
    Sounds like replicators in Star Trek
    - ztjio 8y ago
      Ironically, the types of things that one would put into a museum in that universe are specifically the types of things that replicators can't get right.
    - wizardforhire 8y ago
      I prefer the term solid state 3D printer. It makes the concept seem more feasible and helps to steer conversations towards more concrete solutions (All the while joking of course that we’re building Star Trek Replicators! Because they’re awesome!).
- wongarsu 8y ago
  Getting VR to the point that you can build museums that only need virtual replicas of their exhibitions would be much easier than building universal 3d printers.
- dna_polymerase 8y ago
  Great Idea, make it a stealth startup out of Florida and collect tons of cash, and when you launch present a fancy VR headset capable of ordering from Amazon.
narag 8y ago
In Asimov's Foundation book series, after ten thousands years Humanity loses all memories of Earth, even its location, after it was abandoned because it became radioactive. The theme of History volatility is recurring: some key events in the multi-century plot get also forgotten. The loss causes a feeling of sadness, but at the same time --and I guess this was his intention-- remarks that human spirit, the ideas of freedom and fraternity, is the important thing and what deserves to endure. I'm sorry to hear the news but let me keep this bit: "As of writing, no deaths or injuries have been reported."
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Off topic: I just realized that Pixar cribbed off Asimov for WALL-E (or the parallels are quite coincidental). Would’ve never thought of it without your comment. Kudos!
- flukus 8y ago
  This is common in scifi, in Dune the earth is long forgotten (ignoring crappy prequels), in Revelation Space it's known but all the interesting stuff is happening elsewhere. I think it's more about trying to avoid explaining how we get from today to the time of the story, which involves some always wrong predictions of the future. Contrast with something like star trek where the Eugenics War apparently ended 22 years ago.
natch 8y ago
Questioning the wisdom of having massively centralized stores of physical artifacts right now. Museums, libraries...
- samstave 8y ago
  Funny that this triggered that thought, but the fires of alexandria should have already... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
  - natch 8y ago
    I wasn’t saying it’s the first time the thought was triggered.
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  On the other hand, if you have them scattered all over the place, you're more likely to lose them bit by bit as they get lost, forgotten, or broken. The other reply to your comment mentioned the Library of Alexandria. If the library wasn't there to store all the books/scrolls, and they were instead scattered around, how many of them would've survived to the modern day? Damned if you do, damned if you don't. The obvious answer is to ensure that we have as many backups as possible, in various locations. One of my tasks for the next few months is to backup all my important files (mostly photos), so that I have a copy at my house and a copy on the cloud. Then I'm also going to burn them to archival DVDs and send the DVDs to my parents' house, which is in another country. That way, if I somehow lose all my different backups, I've got much bigger problems (e.g. global disaster, nuclear war, etc).
  - laurent123456 8y ago
    Yes since most of these objects are unique, there's no easy way to preserve them. Proper funding for the museum would be a good start and then digitising as much as possible for backup. The high quality photos that the Portrait Gallery did of their collection is a great example [0]. For other objects, 3D scans would be a good way to preserve as much information as possible in case of a disaster. [0] https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitZoom/mw11574/William-Shakespeare?LinkID=mp04051&search=sas&sText=shakespeare&OConly=true&role=sit&rNo=0 https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitZoom/mw115...
Pristina 8y ago
I love when something like this happens and people opine about the loss of objects that just 10 minutes ago they didn't even know existed.
munfred 8y ago
I'm brazilian, I visited the museum in 2013, a year before the world cup. It was very memorable to me because it's essentially the only museum in Brazil that was an European style natural history museum (especially since there are so few museums in Brazil). I walked there, it's about half a mile from the Maracanã Stadium, as you can see on the picture here [1] (in portuguese). As I passed by the stadium, I distinctly remember large banners bragging that over 700 million reais were being spent to renew the stadium. That was about $300m at the time, a truly outlandish ammount in brazilian reality. I then visited the museum, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and took note of the fact that an entire wing was closed "for indeterminate time". I asked the staff and the reason was, obviously, budget cuts. I took another few years, just after the government secured reelection in 2015, that the government let the gravity of the fiscal situation surface, by which point there was no coming back from a 5-10 year long economic and political crisis that is still unfolding. With regards to the museum, it should be noted that it was operating on a reduced annual budget, receiving only 60% of the 550,000 reais (less than $150k) allocated funds from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro [2]. If these numbers sound like a pittance, it's because they are. I will not be surprised if this fire was started by something as simple as an electrical malfunction of an old circuit that should have been replaced decades ago. It really saddens me to see this news, that museum was something very unique for Brazil, but I'm not surprised. Brazil has been running on life support for two years now and I think the situation will continue worsening for a few more years. I was thinking the country would stave off becoming a second Venezuela, but the government and politicians seem set on running everything to the ground. I'm not holding my breath for our presidential elections, which are happening next month. I am sure that nothing other than sad words and perhaps some political opportunism will come out of this incident, and that no serious efforts will be done to learn from this situation and prevent similar ones from happening in the future. Unlike the US where there is serious inquiry and learning when bad things happen, the brazilian modus operandi in any such situation is to say "oh what a tragedy", turn a blind eye to root causes, and go on as usual. I am very glad I got out of Brazil to pursue graduate studies in the US, and I truly hope never to have to go back. [1] https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2018/09/02/museu-nacional-guarda-acervo-de-mais-de-20-milhoes-de-itens.ghtml https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2018/09/02/mu... [2] https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2018/09/02/museu-nacional-sofre-com-a-falta-de-reforma.ghtml https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2018/09/02/mu...
alister 8y ago
The article says that the cause is not yet known, but I'm thinking it might be an electrical fault or bad wiring, which seems like a common problem for older structures in Brazil (or anywhere in the world). A short circuit caused a massive fire at another big museum in Brazil in 2015, the Museu da Língua Portuguesa[1] in Sao Paulo. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_the_Portuguese_Language#2015_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_the_Portuguese_Langu...
kristianov 8y ago
Looks like an inside job. The artifacts are stolen, and the museum is torched to destroy evidence..
moultano 8y ago
The museum is asking for people who have photos of the exhibits to send them in to this address. isabeladfrreitas@gmail.com https://mobile.twitter.com/TetZoo/status/1036619354924875776 https://mobile.twitter.com/TetZoo/status/1036619354924875776
personlurking 8y ago
I didn't see this story was already posted before I tried to post it via another link. But here's my comment: This is on par with The Smithsonian or the British Museum burning to the ground. It's where Brazil's Declaration of Independence was signed and it was the residence of the Portuguese Royal Family for decades. While the closest fire station is 500 meters from where the fire happened, and the National Museum is located in front of a lake (in a place called Quinta da Boa Vista), they had issues accessing their water supply - for which they are the entity responsible - and whole areas of the wooden, termite-infested museum burned while they tried to sort the water supply out. The museum was in disrepair for several years, with the media reporting on it repeatedly, but their govt budget for 2018 was a mere $13,500. Since 2010, it was the fourth important Brazilian museum to be burnt down due to fire (or rather, lack of a proper fire prevention system). Not from the article, but important to emphasize: "The museum of Quinta da Boa Vista had the largest collection of Egyptian mummies outside of Egypt, the largest collection of Pompeii outside of Italy, the mummies of the American civilizations, the fossils of Luzia, the oldest homo sapiens ever found in Brazil. Largest meteor to ever fall into the country. A huge collection of dinosaur fossils." And, finally, I'll add that the museum was where physical evidence of new species was mandatorily catalogued. It's a loss for so many other branches outside history, like biology.
tomohawk 8y ago
If things were so bad, why did they not consider divesting? By hoarding these treasures, they merely put them at great risk, eventually assuring their destruction. If you have someething of worth, you have a responsibility to take care of it, and, if you cannot take care of it, then ensure it gets into the hands of someone who will.
- williamscales 8y ago
  > why did they not consider divesting? I think we can imagine many reasons why folks who aren't motivated to fund the museum wouldn't be willing to swallow their pride. That said, I wonder if there's a role for a global museum rescue organization. It could be funded by anyone who wants to help and their role could be to go in to troubled museums and help out. It seems to me that this might touch on cultural sensitivities however. People might be scared that foreigners are coming in and will steal their artifacts.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
gassiss 8y ago
Funny thing, I live in Rio de Janeiro, and no one is talking about it today. That's how much people care. It's sad.
frakr 8y ago
It would be an exciting mystery novel for this fire to be a coverup for a massive theft of antiquities.

Concentrating irreplaceable artifacts in a museum just magnifies the probability of losing them all.

microcolonel 8y ago
Especially storing them in a building made of flammable materials (which have not been treated to retard flames), or in a flood plain, or a tornado zone, the foot of a volcano...
kartan 8y ago
Yes. It's convenience and cost vs risk.
haney 8y ago
Keeping them in lots of separate places just magnifies the probability of the public not being able to view them.
- natch 8y ago
  But maybe only centralize them when you can provide reasonable assurance of the safety of the items. In the meantime, place them with more secure facilities for safekeeping. I think national pride gets in the way, though.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Securing and protecting many small facilities is going to cost more than doing so for one facility and impinges on the reasons for gathering artefacts - study, education, etc..
- natch 8y ago
  I think the probability of public viewing is down to zero now, so that didn’t work out so well, did it?
- wruza 8y ago
  Now it is zero though.
- ztjio 8y ago
  A single museum could be broken into many smaller buildings, with measures taken specifically to avoid spreading fires and things like earthquake damage from one building to another. Decentralization doesn't have to mean spreading things miles apart.
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    Exactly. If you visit Mt Vernon (Washington's home), the kitchen is in a separate building. It seems odd, until the guide tells you that kitchen fires were common, and so the kitchens were separated from the main house.
- ZenPsycho 8y ago
  Usually the public viewing areas are limited in space. The bulk of a 20 million artefact collection would have to be kept in more recently built warehouses, possibly underground, and kept near by the main museum. In the event of a fire they can be sealed and filled with argon gas, exactly the same as any highly sensitive data centre, such as for instance, the IRS data centre, or the stock market. Funding for such things should have been a no brainer considering the high potential economic value of these objects. The Brazilian government should have thought of this building as though it's a bank, because it basically is, if you consider that the museum could have decided to, for instance, sell off most of the collection if it decided to, and have ended up well ahead of losing essentially billions of dollars.
  - MattBlissett 8y ago
    > The bulk of a 20 million artefact collection would have to be kept in more recently built warehouses That's not often the case. These museums were built to house these collections, and often include rooms full of drawers, compacting shelving etc with the collected objects. This incudes the basement, but not only the basement. For example, the Natural History Museum in London has "the majority" of their 80 million specimens stored in the museum in London. You may be able to go on a behind-the-scenes tour of your local museum.
knlinux 8y ago
That's not true and what they did was probably optimal. The probability of losing the whole collection over time is the same. By spreading collections around into N locations, you would have, on average, N times more fires like this one, but fire would be engulfing a smaller collection at a time (1/N). Moreover, by having it centralized you can reduce costs, hence save money and use it to lower the risk of fire. What they did by centralizing the collection was the best thing they could do to save it, but apparently they didn't even have money to protect a single museum from fire hazard. Spread the collection around the country and you don't even have money/people for proper maintenance and protection against theft in each individual location.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  That would only be true if the risk of fire is evenly distributed, which it obviously isn't, and that a museum burning down now and then would not motivate better protections for the rest. In any case, the strategy they chose obviously didn't work and they lost it 100%.
  - knlinux 8y ago
    It probably isn’t but it’s safe to assume that this location was at least around the median in terms of fire risk (this location had probably better infrastructure than the average Brazilian city), so the fact that there might be less risky locations doesn’t change much since you’ll then have places with higher risk, where the collection will have burned down even sooner. Even if you knew the best location with the least hazard, optimally you would still want to move all collections there anyway. The strategy didn’t work since any strategy was likely deemed for failure due lack of funding, not because it was suboptimal.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  > By spreading collections around into N locations, you would have, on average, N times more fires like this one, but fire would be engulfing a smaller collection at a time (1/N) If the likelihood of a fire starting in a non-residential building is roughly proportional to the square footage of the building, then you'd have roughly the same total number of fires across all buildings but 1/N of the collection destroyed each time.

Surely a 5.5Ton meteorite could survive the heat off a building fire... Right? The director's statement that everything has been lost seems rather pessimistic. There must be some sort of digital catalog of what was present in the museum that'll preserve it in some form.

danso 8y ago
The museum was reportedly in disrepair from lack of funds and appears to have a non-effective fire suppression system. I don’t think it’s a given that it had a robust digital archive. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/03/fire-engulfs-brazil-national-museum-rio https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/03/fire-engulfs-b...
- ericdykstra 8y ago
  Millions of priceless artifacts destroyed due to negligence by Brazil and all of the museums that loaned artifacts to a museum that didn't care to protect them.
  - samstave 8y ago
    How are we to know that the fire isnt a cover for a massive heist?
    - alister 8y ago
      Talking about museum heists in Rio, I went to see the Museu da Chácara do Céu -- an art museum hidden away on a mountain top -- because they had a Dalí, a Picasso, a Monet, and a Matisse according to a guidebook. I didn't see any of them. The front desk told me that they were all taken in a heist. They had a poster offering a surprisingly low R$5000 reward, about US$1250, for their recovery.
- MattBlissett 8y ago
  We have records of almost 270,000 preserved animal and plant specimens, for example leaves/flowers dried and pressed or whole insects most likely pinned down into a drawer. This is still useful data, for example knowing that a species used to be present in a particular area, but if a specimen is destroyed then in the absence of a photograph of the specimen (and sometimes that's not enough) the original assertion can no longer be verified. https://www.gbif.org/publisher/4205110f-3f0f-40d8-bd0f-2fa71bc827b5 https://www.gbif.org/publisher/4205110f-3f0f-40d8-bd0f-2fa71... (I work at GBIF, so I know this data exists, but otherwise I know nothing more than the article covers. I do not know what proportion of the total biodiversity collection 270,000 is, whether they were stored in this building, or whether there are images of them. As one example, they estimate 550,000 plant specimens, but share data of 42,000. That might well mean it isn't electronic, or it might mean it exists in a database but isn't yet shared as open data.)

revskill 8y ago

We need a way to convert back-forth real thing <-> digital things. Then we could backup everything on Earth and move to the Moon, or Mars, for example. It's the only way to move our stuffs any where we want.

bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
DPC & PDC. Digital-Physical Converter, Physical-Digital Converter. Sounds like a good choice of terminology for a new Sci-Fi book.
- Jedi72 8y ago
  Sounds like replicators in Star Trek
  - ztjio 8y ago
    Ironically, the types of things that one would put into a museum in that universe are specifically the types of things that replicators can't get right.
  - wizardforhire 8y ago
    I prefer the term solid state 3D printer. It makes the concept seem more feasible and helps to steer conversations towards more concrete solutions (All the while joking of course that we’re building Star Trek Replicators! Because they’re awesome!).
wongarsu 8y ago
Getting VR to the point that you can build museums that only need virtual replicas of their exhibitions would be much easier than building universal 3d printers.
dna_polymerase 8y ago
Great Idea, make it a stealth startup out of Florida and collect tons of cash, and when you launch present a fancy VR headset capable of ordering from Amazon.

narag 8y ago

In Asimov's Foundation book series, after ten thousands years Humanity loses all memories of Earth, even its location, after it was abandoned because it became radioactive. The theme of History volatility is recurring: some key events in the multi-century plot get also forgotten. The loss causes a feeling of sadness, but at the same time --and I guess this was his intention-- remarks that human spirit, the ideas of freedom and fraternity, is the important thing and what deserves to endure. I'm sorry to hear the news but let me keep this bit: "As of writing, no deaths or injuries have been reported."

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Off topic: I just realized that Pixar cribbed off Asimov for WALL-E (or the parallels are quite coincidental). Would’ve never thought of it without your comment. Kudos!
flukus 8y ago
This is common in scifi, in Dune the earth is long forgotten (ignoring crappy prequels), in Revelation Space it's known but all the interesting stuff is happening elsewhere. I think it's more about trying to avoid explaining how we get from today to the time of the story, which involves some always wrong predictions of the future. Contrast with something like star trek where the Eugenics War apparently ended 22 years ago.

natch 8y ago

Questioning the wisdom of having massively centralized stores of physical artifacts right now. Museums, libraries...

samstave 8y ago
Funny that this triggered that thought, but the fires of alexandria should have already... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
- natch 8y ago
  I wasn’t saying it’s the first time the thought was triggered.
toomanybeersies 8y ago
On the other hand, if you have them scattered all over the place, you're more likely to lose them bit by bit as they get lost, forgotten, or broken. The other reply to your comment mentioned the Library of Alexandria. If the library wasn't there to store all the books/scrolls, and they were instead scattered around, how many of them would've survived to the modern day? Damned if you do, damned if you don't. The obvious answer is to ensure that we have as many backups as possible, in various locations. One of my tasks for the next few months is to backup all my important files (mostly photos), so that I have a copy at my house and a copy on the cloud. Then I'm also going to burn them to archival DVDs and send the DVDs to my parents' house, which is in another country. That way, if I somehow lose all my different backups, I've got much bigger problems (e.g. global disaster, nuclear war, etc).
- laurent123456 8y ago
  Yes since most of these objects are unique, there's no easy way to preserve them. Proper funding for the museum would be a good start and then digitising as much as possible for backup. The high quality photos that the Portrait Gallery did of their collection is a great example [0]. For other objects, 3D scans would be a good way to preserve as much information as possible in case of a disaster. [0] https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitZoom/mw11574/William-Shakespeare?LinkID=mp04051&search=sas&sText=shakespeare&OConly=true&role=sit&rNo=0 https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitZoom/mw115...

Pristina 8y ago

I love when something like this happens and people opine about the loss of objects that just 10 minutes ago they didn't even know existed.

munfred 8y ago

I'm brazilian, I visited the museum in 2013, a year before the world cup. It was very memorable to me because it's essentially the only museum in Brazil that was an European style natural history museum (especially since there are so few museums in Brazil). I walked there, it's about half a mile from the Maracanã Stadium, as you can see on the picture here [1] (in portuguese). As I passed by the stadium, I distinctly remember large banners bragging that over 700 million reais were being spent to renew the stadium. That was about $300m at the time, a truly outlandish ammount in brazilian reality. I then visited the museum, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and took note of the fact that an entire wing was closed "for indeterminate time". I asked the staff and the reason was, obviously, budget cuts. I took another few years, just after the government secured reelection in 2015, that the government let the gravity of the fiscal situation surface, by which point there was no coming back from a 5-10 year long economic and political crisis that is still unfolding. With regards to the museum, it should be noted that it was operating on a reduced annual budget, receiving only 60% of the 550,000 reais (less than $150k) allocated funds from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro [2]. If these numbers sound like a pittance, it's because they are. I will not be surprised if this fire was started by something as simple as an electrical malfunction of an old circuit that should have been replaced decades ago. It really saddens me to see this news, that museum was something very unique for Brazil, but I'm not surprised. Brazil has been running on life support for two years now and I think the situation will continue worsening for a few more years. I was thinking the country would stave off becoming a second Venezuela, but the government and politicians seem set on running everything to the ground. I'm not holding my breath for our presidential elections, which are happening next month. I am sure that nothing other than sad words and perhaps some political opportunism will come out of this incident, and that no serious efforts will be done to learn from this situation and prevent similar ones from happening in the future. Unlike the US where there is serious inquiry and learning when bad things happen, the brazilian modus operandi in any such situation is to say "oh what a tragedy", turn a blind eye to root causes, and go on as usual. I am very glad I got out of Brazil to pursue graduate studies in the US, and I truly hope never to have to go back. [1] https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2018/09/02/museu-nacional-guarda-acervo-de-mais-de-20-milhoes-de-itens.ghtml https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2018/09/02/mu... [2] https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2018/09/02/museu-nacional-sofre-com-a-falta-de-reforma.ghtml https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2018/09/02/mu...

alister 8y ago

The article says that the cause is not yet known, but I'm thinking it might be an electrical fault or bad wiring, which seems like a common problem for older structures in Brazil (or anywhere in the world). A short circuit caused a massive fire at another big museum in Brazil in 2015, the Museu da Língua Portuguesa[1] in Sao Paulo. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_the_Portuguese_Language#2015_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_the_Portuguese_Langu...

kristianov 8y ago

Looks like an inside job. The artifacts are stolen, and the museum is torched to destroy evidence..

moultano 8y ago

The museum is asking for people who have photos of the exhibits to send them in to this address. isabeladfrreitas@gmail.com https://mobile.twitter.com/TetZoo/status/1036619354924875776 https://mobile.twitter.com/TetZoo/status/1036619354924875776

personlurking 8y ago

I didn't see this story was already posted before I tried to post it via another link. But here's my comment: This is on par with The Smithsonian or the British Museum burning to the ground. It's where Brazil's Declaration of Independence was signed and it was the residence of the Portuguese Royal Family for decades. While the closest fire station is 500 meters from where the fire happened, and the National Museum is located in front of a lake (in a place called Quinta da Boa Vista), they had issues accessing their water supply - for which they are the entity responsible - and whole areas of the wooden, termite-infested museum burned while they tried to sort the water supply out. The museum was in disrepair for several years, with the media reporting on it repeatedly, but their govt budget for 2018 was a mere $13,500. Since 2010, it was the fourth important Brazilian museum to be burnt down due to fire (or rather, lack of a proper fire prevention system). Not from the article, but important to emphasize: "The museum of Quinta da Boa Vista had the largest collection of Egyptian mummies outside of Egypt, the largest collection of Pompeii outside of Italy, the mummies of the American civilizations, the fossils of Luzia, the oldest homo sapiens ever found in Brazil. Largest meteor to ever fall into the country. A huge collection of dinosaur fossils." And, finally, I'll add that the museum was where physical evidence of new species was mandatorily catalogued. It's a loss for so many other branches outside history, like biology.

tomohawk 8y ago

If things were so bad, why did they not consider divesting? By hoarding these treasures, they merely put them at great risk, eventually assuring their destruction. If you have someething of worth, you have a responsibility to take care of it, and, if you cannot take care of it, then ensure it gets into the hands of someone who will.

williamscales 8y ago
> why did they not consider divesting? I think we can imagine many reasons why folks who aren't motivated to fund the museum wouldn't be willing to swallow their pride. That said, I wonder if there's a role for a global museum rescue organization. It could be funded by anyone who wants to help and their role could be to go in to troubled museums and help out. It seems to me that this might touch on cultural sensitivities however. People might be scared that foreigners are coming in and will steal their artifacts.

deleted 8y ago

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gassiss 8y ago

Funny thing, I live in Rio de Janeiro, and no one is talking about it today. That's how much people care. It's sad.

frakr 8y ago

It would be an exciting mystery novel for this fire to be a coverup for a massive theft of antiquities.