Something smells funny in the Cologne City Archive Collapse
The archive was built in the 1970s, and there was initially no clear answer to the question of why it would suddenly collapse.
Eberhard Illner, a former archive employee, told German radio station Deutschlandfunk the collapse was a “foreseeable catastrophe” and that he had noticed cracks in the building’s basement walls.
I wonder what the toll on the archives will be. Original works lost? Only nine people are still reported missing. The images look like an entire city block has imploded.
Apart from the loss of life, the damage to ancient records appears to be catastrophic; the archives go back over a thousand years, with the oldest known record dating to AD 922, and included many valuable original. Some have estimated the value at half a billion dollars, but of course such irreplaceable records are simply priceless.
However, all is not lost; they had been backing up records to microfiche, and prior to the collapse they had got everything up to 1945. This backup is kept at the Barbarastollen archive, which is constructed in a disused silver mine under a granite mountain, in sealed stainless containers with internally optimised microclimates designed to last 500 years after the power fails, and indefinitely while the refrigerators remain on.