The fire that struck Brazil’s National Museum was a preventable tragedy
In the days following the fire at Brazil’s National Museum, we are learning that neglect contributed to the devastation. The museum didn’t even have sprinklers and its smoke detectors weren’t even working.
Hi there, I’m Jeff and on today’s episode of Plain English, we’ll also talk about the efforts to digitize museum collections around the world, and about the good work that Wikimedia Commons is doing to collect images of Brazil’s national museum after the fact. At the end of the episode today, we’ll talk about what it means to come to grips with something.
Today is episode 86 for Monday, September 17, 2018. Happy Independence Day to all of you listening from Mexico—Independence Day was yesterday. The transcript of today’s program can be found at PlainEnglish.com/86 and like every episode we have translations of the hard words and phrases from English into six languages: Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, French, Italian, and Japanese.
Neglect contributed to Brazil museum disaster
As Brazil comes to grips with the devastating fire that destroyed its National Museum and 90 percent of its holdings, it is becoming increasingly clear that the tragedy was preventable.
Years of neglect and budget cuts led to a dangerous situation. The museum did not have a fire suppression system; the best it had were some smoke detectors and a few fire extinguishers. The smoke detectors in the building were not even working, according to the deputy director of the museum. Local media reported that museum employees had to collect money just for cleaning services. A museum professor said that successive federal governments had not provided the budget necessary to maintain the museum in proper condition.
When firefighters arrived on the scene, the fire hydrants closest to the museum were not working, so they had to pump water from a nearby pond, adding to the delays in putting out the fire. In a devastating irony, the fire struck just weeks before the museum was to receive a $5 million government grant to install a fire-suppression system, including sprinklers. This was not the only museum in Brazil to have suffered from neglect. The Paulista Museum in Sao Paulo is closed for renovations; an entire floor of the museum is in danger of collapsing. Hopefully that work can happen without any loss of its collection.
Many Brazilians took to social media and the streets to protest the neglect of such a large treasure. One noted that a quarter of the money spent on just one World Cup stadium would have been enough to install a fire suppression system that could have prevented, or greatly reduced, the damage from this fire.
Brazil is not alone in losing national treasures due to disasters like this. A fire struck Hampton Court Palace in Britain in 1986, destroying parts of a palace built in the 1500s. The New Orleans Museum of Art suffered after Hurricane Katrina. Museum collections were damaged or lost in the tsunamis that struck Japan in 2011. Over 1,000 artifacts were damaged in the Malawi National Museum in Egypt during protests and civil unrest in 2013. And India and Nepal have lost priceless artifacts due to fire and earthquakes there.
Hopefully this tragedy can teach a lesson to governments around the world about the importance of safeguarding their national treasures. Museums should assess building security, disaster management, and protection against fires, floods, and other natural disasters. The Smithsonian Institute in the United States even has a course for museums on preservation and disaster planning.
No matter how much planning goes into disaster prevention, there is always going to be at least some risk that the physical collection of a museum will be destroyed. That is just a fact of life. Even the best museum is not invincible. But we live in the digital age and museums have the option of digitizing their collections—not only so that they may be preserved in some way in the event of a disaster, but also so that their collections may be more accessible to people who cannot see them in person.
For items like paintings and drawings and other flat works of art, high resolution photographs can be taken and uploaded online. But for many items in museums around the world, digitizing a collection is about more than just taking a photograph. To digitize three-dimensional objects, researchers take the object down and subject it to detailed 3-D scanning. Even for flat objects like paintings, the photographs have to be the highest possible resolution with the best possible equipment in order to faithfully reproduce the actual painting or drawing. The process also includes attaching all the information we know about an object to its electronic record. High-quality digitization has the advantage of providing a much more realistic online archive of an artifact, but it is also expensive and time-consuming—digitization is often a luxury that many of the world’s museums do not have.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which is one of the best museums in the United States, released 375,000 images in its first wave of digitization. The images also come with the tombstone data—the information you read about on placards on the wall—making it easier for people to interact with the collection online. The Smithsonian Institution—a collection of free museums in Washington, DC.—has an ambitious digitization project, but they have 140 million objects—an almost impossible amount to photograph and digitize. Due to the sheer size of the collection, the Smithsonian and many other museums around the world are limited in what they can digitize.
In the wake of the tragedy in Brazil, the Wikimedia foundation, which runs the popular web site Wikipedia, has solicited photographs from users to catalogue and preserve images of the collection. They also run a web site called Wikimedia Commons, which collects public-domain images. The site had 200 images from the National Museum before the fire, but they are now collecting thousands more from volunteers who took their own photographs. The Portuguese-language Wikipedia site, and later the English-language site, asked users to submit their personal photos from the collection. The response was impressive; thousands of images came in after just a couple of days. Wikimedia has volunteers who go from museum to museum in Brazil and around the world, helping museum directors digitize their collections.
I know digitization is good. Actually in researching this episode I took some time to browse through the Met’s collection online and the images are really fantastic and you can learn a lot from the information online. But your screen is only so sharp and there is something really special about getting to see a painting or sculpture or a piece of art in person. Last week I had the chance to go to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and on the second floor they have a hallway with Egyptian artifacts, including mummies, drawings, sculptures, pottery, things like that. They were from thousands of years ago – hundreds of years BC, some of them – and they looked like they could have been created yesterday. They were so well-preserved, the colors were vivid, they were in perfect shape. You can look at one piece in person and take yourself on a journey back in time and imagine the people who created that piece of art, learn about what different pieces meant and said about society. That’s not something you’ll ever get on a screen.
Quick hello to two listeners today. First, Adailton from Brazil. I asked him what the mood was like in Brazil after the museum fire and he confirmed that people are sad about the loss but also disappointed in the government for not investing in the proper care and maintenance of the building. That seems to be what people are thinking right now, so thanks to Adailton for providing that context for me as I prepared the last two episodes. Also Carlos from Colombia. Carlos is 16 years old and he listens to Plain English and reads investing web sites all in English. If you are 16 and already listening to this program, then you are going to be perfect in English before you know it. Thanks Carlos and Adailton for listening and keep up the good work.
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