Historical Tragedy in Brazil

Good day all. There has been tremendous historical tragedy in Rio de Janeiro overnight. No lives were lost, but an incalculable loss to the history of Mankind has occurred.

There has been a fire in the 200 year old National Museum that has flat out gutted the building. The story is still ongoing, but the pictures pretty much say it all. Here are some of the details from The Guardian:

Brazil’s oldest and most important historical and scientific museum has been consumed by fire, and much of its archive of 20 million items is believed to have been destroyed. The fire at Rio de Janeiro’s 200-year-old National Museum began after it closed to the public on Sunday and raged into the night. There were no reports of injuries, but the loss to Brazilian science, history and culture was incalculable, two of its vice-directors said.

“It was the biggest natural history museum in Latin America. We have invaluable collections. Collections that are over 100 years old,” Cristiana Serejo, one of the museum’s vice directors, told the G1 news site.

First, we’re all glad that no one was killed or injured. However, with something this important, why wasn’t a state of the art fire prevention/suppression system in place? Yes, those are expensive, but there are many rich progressive hypocrites wealthy benefactors around the world who could have chipped in.

It wasn’t immediately clear how the fire began. The museum was part of Rio’s Federal University but had fallen into disrepair in recent years. Its impressive collections included items brought to Brazil by Dom Pedro I – the Portuguese prince regent who declared the then-colony’s independence from Portugal – Egyptian and Greco-Roman artefacts, “Luzia”, a 12,000 year-old skeleton and the oldest in the Americas, fossils, dinosaurs, and a meteorite found in 1784. Some of the archive was stored in another building but much of the collection is believed to have been destroyed.

Ok, now I do see some politics here. Brazil has been having some issues of late, and I suspect that’s why money wasn’t set aside for maintenance and upgrades. Still, the curators and directors could have gone public and raised some funds. I’m sure George Soros and Tom Steyer could have spared a few million from their ongoing spending to overthrow the United States Government. How about Bill Gates? He’s sitting on billions and trying to figure out how to give it away.

Brazil’s president, Michel Temer, who has presided over cuts to science and education as part of a wider austerity drive, called the losses “incalculable”. “Today is a tragic day for the museology of our country,” he tweeted. “Two hundred years of work research and knowledge were lost.”

Nice going numbnuts. While I fully understand that cuts needed to be made, you should have looked into alternative sources of revenue for things like this museum. That’s what leadership is.

Mércio Gomes, an anthropologist and former president of Brazil’s indigenous agency, Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI), compared the loss to the burning of the library of Alexandria in 48BC. “We Brazilians only have 500 years of history. Our National Museum was 200 years old, but that’s what we had, and what is lost forever,” he wrote on Facebook. “We have to reconstruct our National Museum.”

The bad news is the artifacts are pretty much gone. However, if the scholars were worth anything, they’ve documented every single piece down to the subatomic level and stored that information off site. Hopefully, there are a gazillion pictures floating around the Internet that can be used to recreate what was lost.

Duart also said that the museum had just closed a deal with the Brazilian government’s development bank, BNDES, for funds that included a fire prevention project. “This is the most terrible irony,” he said.

Well, damn. That flat out sucks. From the pictures I’ve seen, it looks like the building is a total loss. What needs to be done is a non-political fundraiser to rebuild the museum and restore as many artifacts as possible. Some, sadly, are gone forever. Others could be recreated if the materials and details of their creation exist. Yes, they won’t be the originals, but they will be available and they will, I hope, have the original data for examination.

The local fire department tried to put the fire out, but was stymied due to two dry fire hydrants. They had to bring in tankers and run hoses to a nearby lake, and that took time. From what I’ve been reading, firefighter did go in and working with the museum staff, tried to save what they could. A tip of the hat to those people for doing the best they could with what they had available.

Thatisall