By Zahid Rafiq
SRINAGAR, Jammu Kashmir (AA) – India’s National Museum of Natural History in New Delhi was gutted by fire early Tuesday, destroying a vast trove of rare plant and animal specimens, local officials have said.
“This is a real loss; we will assess the loss when the building is again handed over to us,” said Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar, who visited the site in the wake of the fire.
“The loss cannot be calculated in money,” he added.
Senior fire department officials said the fire broke out at around 1:45am on the museum’s top floor, where repair work had been underway, before quickly engulfing the entire building.
“Fire safety systems were installed in the building, but they failed to function when we tried to operate them,” Rajesh Panwar, deputy chief of the New Delhi Fire Department, told reporters.
“Had they been working, the fire would have been contained,” he said.
Officials said they had yet to ascertain the cause of fire, in which six firemen were injured while trying to extinguish the blaze.
Javadekar said he had ordered 34 museums countrywide to be inspected after it was revealed that the natural history museum’s safety systems failed to work.
India’s National Museum of Natural History was established in 1972 to promote environmental awareness.
According to museum officials, some 1,000 people had visited it each day.
The museum had housed numerous exhibits, including herpetological specimens, dinosaur bones, preserved butterflies, as well as galleries on the origins and evolution of flora and fauna.
The museum’s extensive collection included a 160-million-year-old fossilized bone of a lizard-footed dinosaur known as a Sauropod.
