Fire broke out at The National Museum of Natural History, in New Delhi on Tuesday. The damage caused to the museum remains unaccounted for, as the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change is still in the process of assessing fire damage.
Prakash Javadekar, Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Environment, said it would take about two days for assessment.
Javadekar said, “I have ordered energy and fire audits of all our establishments. We have 34 Zoological Survey of India and Botanical Survey of India museums that thousands of people visit. We will take care that such incidents don’t happen.”
The Museum building was being rented by the Ministry from the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), which also has its offices in the adjacent building.
Reportedly, fire safety devices and mechanisms in the museum that could have doused the fire earlier and contained damage, such as the sprinklers, did not work.
The Minister, however, said since the building was rented there was some limitations. Currently, there are no policy on regular fire and safety audits and the onus for the same falls on the operator of the building.
Close call The fire could potentially have destroyed several fossils, including a 160-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton, a collection of bird eggs, and several stuffed animals, besides preserved butterflies, amphibian and reptile specimens. The Ministry is likely to move the museum to a new site following this incident, although it was anyway planning to shift the museum to a 6.5-acre land allotted to it behind Purana Quila, near Pragati Maidan in New Delhi.
New museum The new museum, to be constructed at a cost of ₹225 crore, is likely to be completed by February 2017.
The FICCI building that housed the National Museum of Natural History – which got gutted out by the massive fire – is an insured building, a chamber official said. Insurance claims will be made for any loss of property due to fire, which took the fire services over four hours to douse and saw as many as 35 fire engines pressed into service.
No casualties were reported. The Ministry of Environment and Forests had established the museum in 1972. The cause of fire is still unknown.