As the sage says: a heroic deed is remembered a life time. Stupid is remembered forever.
This is a tragedy and reading the other comments brings to mind the fact that when I was growing up, we were taught Brazil was an up and coming nation on the international scene. Now it appears to be a hell hole, which was highlighted by the Olympics. What happened to Brazil? I’m going to take a stab and say it has been decades of right wing austerity and government mismanagement.
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Throw in a huge dose of corporate greed to go along with it.
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Not Brazilian, but I would cry if anything ever happened to Lina’s museum…
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It had more than this. This fire was a shame because everyone knew it needed immediately restoration and improvements. I am sure it was the very first museum visited by every school kid in Rio de Janeiro. If you didn’t had the opportunity to visit it with your school mates, you could ask your parents to took you there.
There is a train and a subway station in front of the park. The admittance fee was very cheap, about a US$ 1,00. You could have a funny picnic in the park, sail in a paddle boat and then visit the museum or the Zoo, which is located just behind the Museu Nacional.
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I saw this on my feed and thought it was a damn shame. I always wondered how old, stone buildings caught fire, but I guess they are full of flammable stuff, so…
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Also, a lot of those houses had wood floors and rafters, as the National Museum apparently did.
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This is a horrible tragedy.
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It’s a huge loss. All sorts of irreplaceable scientific specimens were there - hundreds of holotype specimens (the individual organism that is used as the standard to define its species), the oldest human remains found in the Americas, etc. People compare the museum to the British Museum in terms of importance.
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These coincidences are tragic. Glasgow School of Art’s famous Mackintosh Building was terribly damaged by fire 4 years ago and just as rebuilding was nearing completion in June this year, but a week or three before the new fire alarm/prevention system went live, it burnt down again.
Update here:
Sadly, the Brazilian event is more about the contents than the building, I fear, and those can never be restored.
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Of course it’s a terrible event, but I wonder how much of it was due to incompetence, neglect and fatalism.
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More like the rise of the neoliberal economy which demands deep cuts for public infrastructure of all kinds.
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Well, according to one of the scientist who worked for the museum, they found a letter, written by a former director of the museum, in the archives begging for funds in the XIX century.
Unfortunately, it seems, that the people in charge of this country have different priorities.The cuts are deeper these days, but the same blade is cutting for decades.
It is very sad because in spite of the problems of the building and the institution, the cientists and the good people who worked there, were happy because they were making preparations for the 200-year anniversary of the Museu Nacional . As this year we celebrated the 110 years of Japanese immigration, for example, they wanted to make a special exhibition of the museum’s oriental collection.
Now, some politicians are on TV, with a big smile, making promises to build a brand new palace for the museum. They seem to ignore the fact that the palace was important, but what was lost forever was the collection of documents, artifacts and specimens. I am just a recreational visitor, not an expert or scientist, but I know that we lost a lot of valuable stuff this sunday.
Fortunately the Zoo, which have it own problems, wasn’t affected by the fire. The animals are safe for now.
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Do you mean in Brazil or in the US (you’re Brazilian, right?)? I think if the GOP could get away with completely defunding our national museums and archives here in the states, they most certainly would. I’m fairly certain that they see it as a waste of money that could be used for tax cuts and military spending. They keep proposing cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities, for example.
And I’d argue that just because there is plenty of evidence of the lack of protections for such things as archives in the past doesn’t mean that the cause of this tragedy today isn’t related to the current mindset. And of course, neoliberals from the US have been trying to impose their programs on Latin American countries since the Cold War (primarily to ensure US corporations have access to LA markets and to keep out those evil communists supposedly lurking behind every social program proposed by our southern neighbors that has nothing to do with us.
That’s so very depressing this happened, then. I certainly feel for them.
Absolutely. What sort of archives to the national museum house? Any idea?
That’s good news, at least.
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Deeply terrible news. It seems the only saving grace, if there is one, is that no-one died in or combatting the fire (not that I’ve read or heard about, anyway).
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Yes. I am from Rio de Janeiro.
I think it has something to do with these politics and something to do with our own mindset. We don’t pay much attention to science in Brazil.
There is always the language barrier, but this cientist posted a nice thread about the museum in Twitter:
https://twitter.com/thaismayumi/status/1036594640315719681
The most important documents are in Biblioteca Nacional and in the Arquivo Nacional, em other parts of Rio. But I think they kept a lof of papers on ancient people of Latin America and the register of the visit of Marie Curie and Albert Einstein for example. As I said, I was just a mere visitor.
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For persepctive:
The collection of @quaibranly is estimated at 450,000 objects. The @britishmuseum collection is estimated at 8 million works. The collection of @MuseuNacional in Brazil which was destroyed today is estimated at 20 million objects.
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Please be a joke. Please be a joke. Please be a joke.
Oh no. Fortunately nobody was hurt. The fire started just after the closing time. The police had to intervene because some prople tried to invade the blazing building in order to "help"the firemen. But they were just amateurs.
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It survived. Even a hard iron metorite could be damaged by an intense fire for hours and hours.
The heat caused by entering the atmosphere lasts only a few fractions of a second.The fire of those airplanes that hit the Twin Towers in NY melted the structure of the buildings.
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