20M historical artifacts destroyed in Brazil National Museum fire

https://www.cnet.com/news/20-million-historical-artifacts-destroyed-in-brazil-national-museum-fire

by emersonrsantos • 8 years ago

236 72 8 years ago

cnet.com

skookumchuck3• 8 years ago

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

kartan• 8 years ago

Yes. It's convenience and cost vs risk.

haney• 8 years ago

Keeping them in lots of separate places just magnifies the probability of the public not being able to view them.

natch4• 8 years 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.

natch4• 8 years ago

I think the probability of public viewing is down to zero now, so that didn’t work out so well, did it?

wruza• 8 years ago

Now it is zero though.

ztjio2• 8 years 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.

ZenPsycho• 8 years 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.

knlinux2• 8 years 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.

skookumchuck3• 8 years 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%.

Alex3917• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years 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-b...

ericdykstra• 8 years 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.

MattBlissett2• 8 years 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-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.)

userbinator• 8 years ago

Yes, I think the meteorite is the least of their worries. At worst it'll just be a little bit more sooty than it already was. It's all the other far less robust items which are the real concern.

I'm somewhat optimistic about the fossils too --- which are pretty much rock already, so relatively heat-resistant.

thomasfortes• 8 years ago

I'm not...

Even if they could survive the heat, most of the roof collapsed and at the moment the fire still is out of control...

matheusmoreira3• 8 years ago

There must be some sort of digital catalog

I wouldn't count on it...

lucasfcosta• 8 years ago

The meteorite will probably survive, yes, but contamination will occur due to the flames and other burned chemicals.

Also, you would expect museums to have digital catalogs of their collections, but that's not what happens in countries like Brazil.

I'm a Brazilian living in Europe and only when I moved I could see all the "basic" things we don't have. Access to art and culture in Brazil is something awful.

ethelward• 8 years ago

The director's statement that everything has been lost seems rather pessimistic.

I'm not sure a some random commenter on HN can pretend to have a better perspective on the situation than the director of the museum himself.

pbhjpbhj2• 8 years ago

A HN commenter could be more objective, however.

GW150914• 8 years ago

I don’t know about the catalogue, but assuming the meteorite is the usual rocky, iron-nickel composition then it wouldn’t have melted, given that a structure fire tends to top out several hundred degrees below the required temperature. Given that a meteorite has to survive the heat of reentry and impact, it seems unlikely to be fragile or have moisture that would cause fractures either. It would be contaminated and dirty, but not destroyed.

revskill• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

DPC & PDC. Digital-Physical Converter, Physical-Digital Converter. Sounds like a good choice of terminology for a new Sci-Fi book.

Jedi72• 8 years ago

Sounds like replicators in Star Trek

wongarsu• 8 years 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_polymerase2• 8 years 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.

mschuetz• 8 years ago

Much easier to lose and misplace stuff if it's spread all over.

narag• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years 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.

natch4• 8 years ago

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

samstave2• 8 years ago

Funny that this triggered that thought, but the fires of alexandria should have already...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

natch4• 8 years ago

I wasn’t saying it’s the first time the thought was triggered.

toomanybeersies• 8 years 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• 8 years 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/mw115...

andai4• 8 years ago

As someone who's lost data more than once due to problem between keyboard and chair, I like this idea of storing important data out of my own reach.

dna_polymerase2• 8 years ago

Right, let's put all our museums on the blockchain. /s

Seriously, what would be better? We already struggle to get people interested in these large places, which are so interesting, and now we should try to get people interested in hundreds, some of which would only include niches?

andai4• 8 years ago

I'd go out a lot more if I could do it without getting up.

munfred• 8 years 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/mu...

[2] https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2018/09/02/mu...

matheusmoreira3• 8 years ago

Everybody knows what the root cause is: corruption. Everything in this country can be explained by that. Even people with integrity will eventually be corrupted because it's the only way to get things done. What can citizens do about that? I don't know.

I'm glad you got to visit the museum before it was destroyed.

close04• 8 years ago

I remember a similar case (citation needed, don't have a link available) where a museum was destroyed by fire and the director hurried to announce that everything was destroyed.

Years later it turned out that some originals were put up for auction since they were alive and well in some private collections. Many times the original is not displayed for the public anyway and a very good copy is used instead. So someone in the museum got money for selling the originals while the copy was still on display, then got money from the insurance, with the fire covering up everything perfectly (either by accident, or for the insurance money, or to cover up the fact that the originals went missing).

Of course this would just confirm the corruption or poor maintenance arguments.

vhogemann• 8 years ago

No, it's worse than corruption. It's a total and utter lack of interest in properly funding culture and science.

princekolt• 8 years ago

Corruption thrives on the population's general disinterest in politics and education. To say Brazilians are disinterested in these subjects is an understatement.

andai4• 8 years ago

Even people with integrity will eventually be corrupted because it's the only way to get things done.

Could you expand on this, or maybe give an example?

gtirloni• 8 years ago

I was thinking the country would stave off becoming a second Venezuela

That's an exaggeration. Brazil is nowhere near becoming a second Venezuela. The current crisis would have to keep on for at least another 20 years before that, which is extremely unlikely.

Regular life in Brazil continues as usual (unorganized), despite the crisis and it's been getting a bit better lately (not enough to fix the last 4-6 years of economical depression). It's still far away from being Venezuela.

wenc• 8 years ago

Yes, Brazil's economy is bad right now, but it's nowhere near Venezuela's.

Interestingly, Brazil has had experience with hyperinflation between 1980-1994 when the currency was the cruzeiro. The story of how Brazil got out of inflation by introducing a "fake currency" called the URV (Unidade Valor de Real) is the stuff of economic legend [1], but it worked and today there's is the Brazilian "real".

Venezuela's situation is much different -- dictatorship, oil dependency and handouts.

Brazil, bad as it is, has a democracy (broken and corrupt notwithstanding), more industries than just oil (Petrobras not withstanding), and has had investments in higher education and technology (Embraer). Sao Paulo as a city is economically far more advanced than Caracas (and indeed, Rio de Janeiro). Brazil is also a lot bigger than Venezuela, with many big multinational companies like Vale, Embraer, etc. The Brazilian 3G Capital also owns Burger King and Kraft Heinz.

There is hope in Brazil. Much more than in Venezuela.

[1] How Fake Money saved Brazil https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-...

dazzawazza• 8 years ago

I don't know the politics of it all but I will say this. I am really sorry for Brazil's loss. Museums like this are the core of cultural memory and identity and should be cherished. I hope something can be salvaged from this.

I'm really sorry for all Brazillians.

philliphaydon• 8 years ago

This isn't a loss for Brazil alone, it's a loss for the world. So much history lost :( really sad. It was on my list of places to visit before I die.

alister2• 8 years 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_Langu...

kristianov• 8 years ago

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

moultano• 8 years 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

personlurking• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years 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.

gassiss• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

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

20M historical artifacts destroyed in Brazil National Museum fire

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