National Museum of Brazil fire (2018)

On the evening of September 2, 2018, the National Museum of Brazil burned inside the Sao Cristovao Palace, in the Quinta da Boa Vista park in Rio de Janeiro. The institution had just turned two hundred. It held about 20 million items, herbaria, fossils, ethnographic collections, mummies, a library, and most of it went up in a single night. The federal police later traced the start of the fire to an air conditioner in the auditorium. No fire policy covered the building or the collections, and the maintenance budget paid by the supervising university had been cut year after year: no automatic suppression system worth the name, and firefighters who ran short of water in the first hours. In the rubble, the skull of 'Luzia', one of the oldest human remains in the Americas, was recovered in fragments. For the underwriter, the file raises two questions that come back on every heritage risk. The first is value: a herbarium type specimen or an indigenous language recorded on a wax cylinder has no market price, so no credible agreed value and no replacement value, and any sum insured set on such objects would be arbitrary. The second is protection: without detection, compartmentation and a water reserve, no insurer would have written the building at a rate a budget-strapped university could pay. Works lent by other institutions, by contrast, usually stay covered nail to nail under the lender's or the borrower's policy. Not to be confused with state self-insurance, where the public owner chooses to carry the risk on its budget and rebuilds, as with Notre-Dame: in Rio, the lack of cover came first from a lack of money.