Brazil National Museum fire 2018 — ~18.4M of 20M items destroyed

On September 2, 2018, the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro burned. Approximately 18.4 million of 20 million items were destroyed, including 200 years of scientific archives, field records, expedition logs, and irreplaceable catalog data accumulated across decades of Brazilian and international research. The destroyed records included documentation underlying substantial portions of Brazilian natural history, linguistics, and anthropology (S-0030).

The proximate cause was an electrical fault. The architectural cause was that there were no off-site copies of most of the archival material. The museum's annual maintenance budget had collapsed to ~$13,000 in 2018, against the $128,000 the museum required and had not received in any year since 2014. The fire was the trigger; the architecture was what made the fire catastrophic.

This is the extreme variant of C-0018: a single physical failure domain held the only copy of two centuries of accumulated scientific record, and a single physical event reduced it to ash. The event is unrecoverable — there is no funding mechanism that can re-create the destroyed record. Tier 3 architecture would not have prevented the fire; it would have prevented the fire from being a preservation event.