NFPA Journal - September/October 2020 - 52

Perspectives

C U LT U R A L O C C U P A N C I E S

HISTORY
LOST

SUMMER FIRES IN A FRENCH CATHEDRAL AND
A BRAZILIAN MUSEUM UNDERSCORE THE NEED FOR
MORE MODERN FIRE PROTECTION IN HISTORIC
BUILDINGS. WHAT'S STOPPING THE PROGRESS?
Interview conducted and edited by Angelo Verzoni
n June and July, two fires less than
five weeks apart damaged historic
buildings in countries that had each
suffered strikingly similar losses
over the past two years.
On June 15, the Federal University of Minas
Gerais' Natural History Museum and Botanical
Garden in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, about 200 miles
north of Rio de Janeiro, suffered what Smithsonian
Magazine reported as "significant losses" after a
fire tore through the museum, which dates back to
the 1920s and housed about 260,000 artifacts. On
July 18, a fire at the Cathedral of St. Peter and St.
Paul, in the northwestern city of Nantes, France,
reportedly caused extensive interior damage to the
15th-century church.
Both incidents recalled similar events that
transpired recently in the same countries. In April
2019, the 850-year-old Notre-Dame Cathedral in
Paris was damaged so severely by a fire that it
almost collapsed, and experts say it could take

VULNERABLE
The Cathedral of
St. Peter and St.
Paul in Nantes,
France, during a
fire in July. The
blaze occurred a
little over a year
after fire damaged
the Notre-Dame
Cathedral in Paris
and resulted in new
calls for stronger
fire protection
measures for
historic cultural
occupancies
worldwide.
AP/WIDE WORLD

four decades to restore the structure to its former
beauty. In September 2018, a fire sparked by a
faulty air-conditioning unit gutted the 200-yearold National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro,
destroying millions of priceless artifacts. The
flames felt like "a new genocide," one indigenous
Brazilian, whose tribe's artifacts were lost in the
fire, told the New York Times.
Fires in historic or otherwise culturally significant properties aren't just problems in France or
Brazil. "It's happening everywhere," said Didier
Schutz, a French engineer with the global reinsurance firm SCOR. From memory, he listed more
than a dozen such blazes in the past decade,
including fires in China, India, the United
Kingdom, and the United States.
But in France, in particular, fires in historic
buildings seem to be a fairly regular occurrence. Just one month before the Notre-Dame
blaze, a fire damaged the 17th-century Church
of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Julien Kiwior, a French
underwriter with the insurance firm HDI Global
SE, studied the phenomenon for his master's
thesis last year. His work lists 21 fires in historic
buildings in France in 2019 alone. The causes,
Kiwior said, usually relate to electrical systems,
boilers, chimneys, or arson.
After the National Museum fire in Brazil two
years ago, NFPA Journal interviewed Don Moeller,
a California-based fire safety engineering consultant and chair of the technical committee for
NFPA 914, Code for the Fire Protection of Historic
Structures. At the time, he said he hoped the incident would make "a huge impact on the public's
perception of the need to prioritize fire safety" in
historic structures.
NFPA Journal recently reconnected with
Moeller to discuss the latest fires in Brazil and
France, whether he thinks the 2018 National
Museum fire did make an impact, and what challenges remain to preventing losses of historic
buildings from fire.

As you saw the news of these most recent
incidents-the cathedral fire in Nantes
and the museum fire in Belo Horizonte-
what were your thoughts?
The loss of these cultural treasures is an absolute tragedy. These historic properties and the
artifacts housed in them can't be replaced, and
their destruction is a loss to us and to future
generations. It's important for us to know what
happened before we were here and appreciate and
learn from the efforts of our predecessors.

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NFPA Journal - September/October 2020

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