ANN/THE JAKARTA POST – The majority of the objects destroyed in the Saturday night fire at the Indonesian National Museum were replicas, according to an official.
Six rooms in Building ‘A’ of the museum complex in Central Jakarta were damaged in the 8pm blaze that lasted around three hours.
A preliminary investigation found that the fire was caused by an electrical short in a shed being used to store construction materials for the museum’s renovation.
Fanned by strong winds, the blaze spread to Building ‘A’, where parts of the roof and walls collapsed. No casualties were reported.
Building ‘A’ is part of the original structure of the National Museum, built in 1862 by the colonial Dutch East Indies government and opened to the public in 1868.
Building ‘A’ housed the ImersifA video mapping exhibition spanning the various eras of Indonesian history, from prehistory to the 1945 Independence Movement, as well as the Islamic culture gallery and the museum’s prehistory, ethnography and ceramic collections.
The museum complex has approximately 141,000 objects, including prehistoric artefacts, stone sculptures, ceramic pieces and numismatic and geological collections.
Responding to public concerns over the safety of the items at the National Museum, acting head of the education ministry’s Public Service Agency for Museums and Cultural Heritage Preservation (BLU MCB) Ahmad Mahendra, said most of the items affected by the fire were replicas.
“Most of the affected collections were replicas of the prehistoric artefacts, the remaining [originals] are safe,” Ahmad said in a statement on Sunday.
He added that the hundreds of colonial-era artefacts recently returned by the Netherlands had been unaffected by the blaze, as they were stored in a location far from the fire.
Ahmad said the National Museum had formed an internal team to investigate the cause of the fire, to ensure the safety of the existing collections and to inventory the objects that had been damaged or lost in the blaze and those that were still salvageable.
“We’re trying our best to return the National Museum to its prime condition as quickly as possible,” Ahmad said.