Funding cuts blamed as fire ruins iconic National Museum in Brazil
● Nearby hydrants were not working ● Some of Brazil’s first fossils are lost
huge fire engulfed Brazil’s 200-year-old National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, lighting up the night sky with towering flames as firefighters and museum workers raced to save historical relics from the blaze.
The esteemed museum, which houses artefacts from Egypt, Greco-roman art as well as some of the first fossils found in Brazil, was closed to the public at the time of the fire.
The blaze broke out at 7:30pm on Sunday and though the museum said there were no reports of injuries, it was not immediately clear how the fire started.
Roberto Robadey, a spokesman for the fire department, said 80 firefighters were battling the blaze.
The fire was “just about under control” by about midnight local time.
President Michel Temer called it “a sad day for all Brazilians”.
“Two hundred years of work, investigation and knowledge have been lost,” Mr Temer said in a statement.
According to its website, the museum has a vast collection related to the history of Brazil and other countries and that many of its collections came from members of Brazil’s royal family.
Mr Robadey said firefighters got off to a slow start fighting the blaze because the two hydrants closest to the museum were not functioning.
Instead, trucks had to be sent to get water from a nearby lake. But he added some of the museum’s pieces had been spared.
“We were able to remove a lot of things from inside with the help of workers of the museum,” Mr Robadey told Globo News.
Connected to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the museum has expositions that include anthropology, archaeology and palaeontola
ogy, among others. Luiz Fernando Dias Duarte, the vice director of the museum, told Globo news the museum suffered from chronic underfunding.
“Everybody wants to be supportive now,” he said. “We never had adequate support.”
A third of the 30 exhibition halls were closed because of budget cuts, the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper said.
A major dinosaur exhibition, which was forced to shut following a termite attack five months ago, recently reorevenue
pened only thanks to a crowdfunding campaign.
Museum librarian Edson Vargas da Silva said the building had wooden floors and contained “a lot of things that burn very fast” such as paper documents.
Latin America’s largest nation has struggled to emerge from its worst recession in decades.
The state of Rio de Janeiro has been particularly hard hit in recent years thanks to a combination of falling world prices of oil – one of its major sources – as well as mismanagement and massive corruption.
Little more than a month before national elections, even before the flames were put out, the blaze was leading to recriminations about dilapidated infrastructure and budget deficits in the city that hosted the 2016 Summer Olympics.
Marina Silva, one of the leading presidential candidates, tweeted: “Unfortunately given the financial straits of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and all the other public universities the last three years, this was a tragedy that could be seen coming.”
On Instagram, Rio mayor Marcelo Crivella called on the country to rebuild. “It’s a national obligation to reconstruct it from the ashes, recompose every eternal detail of the paintings and photos,” he posted.
“Even if they are not original, they continue to be a reminder of the royal family that gave us independence, the [Portuguese] empire and the first constitution and national unity.”