Second fire in a Brazilian museum in two years revives calls for reform

Researchers in Brazil are reviewing the ashes of a fire that destroyed part of a museum in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais on June 15. The fire follows repeated warnings of museum fire hazards, and comes less than two years after a massive hell destroyed the prized National Museum in Rio de Janeiro.

The last fire reopened wounds in the research community and intensified a national conversation about the need to protect the cultural and scientific heritage of Brazil.

Mariana Lacerda, a geographer at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte, received a disturbing call on Monday morning: a building at the university’s Museum of Natural History and Botanical Garden, which she had run for almost a year. , was on fire. When she arrived on the scene, smoke was still coming out of a single-story building that housed thousands of taxidermized artifacts, bone remains, and animals, many of them collected decades ago.

Fire damage

Two storage rooms filled with fossils and large archaeological objects were covered in soot and smoke. The flames had partly consumed a third room, which housed folk art, indigenous artifacts, and biological specimens. Two more rooms, housing important collections of insects, shells, birds, mammals, human bones, and remains of ancient plants, were almost completely lost.

For these, “there is little hope of material that can be recovered,” says Lacerda. “Something that is so slow to build was destroyed so quickly, in just over an hour.”

Archaeologist André Prous, who started working at the museum in 1975, was devastated. He and his colleagues had accumulated a collection of human remains from a variety of periods, including some of the earliest known inhabitants of Brazil, as well as samples of cultivated and wild plant species. Prous had also seen part of his life’s work disappear during the 2018 fire at the National Museum, when the ancient skulls he helped collect in the 1970s were destroyed.

“Sadness only corresponds to fear that other similar disasters will continue to destroy [Brazil’s] scientific heritage, “he says. Some stone artifacts, pottery, and documentation of the sites he has excavated survived the fire.

Historical losses

Brazilian museums have faced a series of fires, which often result in irreparable losses, says Carolina Vilas Boas, director of museum processes at the Brazilian Institute of Museums in Brasilia. At least 12 buildings of cultural or scientific importance have been burned in the country, many of them in the last 10 years (see “History on fire”). But the full extent of the damage is difficult to know, says Vilas Boas, because the reports are likely incomplete.

Brazil is not alone in losing heritage institutions to fire, she says, but the country has a poor record of caring for its museums. Often fire prevention systems are installed, but budgets are too tight to maintain properly. “Many steps are being taken to mitigate this risk,” he says, but recurring economic crises have hampered long-term planning.

“That lack of resources was unrelated to the fire in the collection warehouses,” says Ricardo Hallal Fakury, structural engineer at UFMG. He did not speculate on the cause of the fire, because investigations are still ongoing. But he says the building that was burned was equipped with smoke detectors and was built primarily from non-flammable materials.

The tragedy in Belo Horizonte has amplified a decades-long discussion among Brazilian scientists pressing for national and state policies to help protect research collections, says Luciane Marinoni, entomologist at the Federal University of Paraná and president of the Brazilian Society of Zoology , both in Curitiba. “The community is upset that we have been trying to solve this problem with the federal government but without success.”

Some protection policies already exist. In 2017, the southern state of Paraná established norms and guidelines for the recognition of biological collections, defining who is responsible for them and establishing objectives and goals to expand them and provide maintenance. Last year, the policy helped researchers convince the Paraná government to allocate 2 million reais ($ 370,000) for state collections in the next three years. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s a solid start, says Marinoni: “The collections are leaving the dark.”

Back in Belo Horizonte, scientists are cleaning up after the fire. This time, however, they do have some guidance on how to move forward.

Researchers at the National Museum have partnered with Lacerda to advise on the recovery of items that may still be recoverable. They are sharing protocols they developed after the 2018 fire with UFMG faculty and students who have volunteered to help. “Unfortunately, we are now experts in this matter,” says paleontologist Alexander Kellner, director of the National Museum. “We went through it. We know the mistakes that we must avoid, we have a way of acting, we have a methodology “.