New Yorker: In Rio museum fire, Brazil lost more than the past
Alejandro Chacoff reports on efforts to uncover the damage to the country’s present and future
The stories that have emerged in the days since the fire at the National Museum have been harrowing. Paulo Buckup, a zoology professor who specializes in fish and molecular diversity in vertebrates, broke down doors and ran into the burning palace, grabbing drawers full of specimens of mollusks. His colleague Alexander Kellner, the director of the museum, went on national television and described the experience of stepping into the museum while the fire was blazing. The flames had not yet reached the floor where his office was located, but he was told by a firefighter that nothing could be done: the hydrants at the site were not working. Many foreign correspondents have reached for analogies to give readers a sense of the disaster, but it’s hard to convey the museum’s significance: in addition to containing one of the richest collections of natural-history artifacts in the world, it was one of Latin America’s leading centers for postgraduate studies. It’s as if, in New York, the American Museum of Natural History and the New School, or a part of the Columbia campus, had been built on the same spot, and then was reduced to ashes. …
