A fire that ripped through one of Russia’s largest university libraries is believed to have damaged more than 1 million historic documents, with some describing the fire as a cultural Chernobyl.
The blaze, which started on Friday and was still not completely out on Saturday evening, ravaged 2,000m2 of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences in Moscow, which was created in 1918 and holds about 10 million documents — some from the 16th century.
“It’s a major loss for science. This is the largest collection of its kind in the world, probably equivalent to the [US] Library of Congress,” Russian Academy of Sciences president Vladimir Fortov was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.
Photo: EPA
“One can find documents there that are impossible to find elsewhere, all the social sciences use this library. What has happened here is reminiscent of Chernobyl,” he said, referring to the 1986 nuclear catastrophe.
Fortov said about 15 percent of the collection had been damaged at the library, which includes one of the world’s richest collections of Slavic-language works, but also documents from Italy and the US.
Fortov told Kommersant FM radio that much of the damage was caused by water from the firefighting operations.
However, no one was injured.
The fire broke out on Friday evening on the library’s second floor and continued burning all day on Saturday, despite 200 firefighters’ efforts to douse the blaze.
Library authorities initially said the documents were not in danger, but once the fire caused 1,000m2 of the roof to collapse, they were less certain about the risk to the collection.
According to Russian media, investigators looking into the cause of the blaze suspect an electrical short circuit was to blame.
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