Police Still Close One Historic Room At The National Museum

National Museum is temporarily closed/ Photo: Rizky Sulistio/ VOI

JAKARTA - Hundreds of people from the Indonesian National Museum team were deployed to evacuate collections and historical objects from Building A affected by the fire. The evacuation was carried out by joint officers.

"The process of evacuating a number of valuable and historical artifacts from within Building A was carried out with the Forensic Laboratory Center (Puslabfor)," said Acting (Plt) Head of the Public Service Agency for Museums and Cultural Conservation (BLU MCB), Ahmad Mahendra in a statement received by VOI, Tuesday, September 19.

Mahendra said, after the fire, his party formed a cross-unit investigation and evacuation team related to the closure of six rooms affected by Puslabfor.

"The closure is limited to one affected room for further investigation. Meanwhile, the evacuation and transfer of collections of historical objects is slowly being carried out in the other five rooms," he said.

The process of evacuating historical collections from areas affected by the fire was carried out starting Monday, September 18.

"The evacuation from the affected area to the temporary storage room was accompanied by the police. We are conducting an inventory to ensure that every historical object is recorded accurately and will receive the necessary treatment during this recovery period," he said.

Mahendra explained that the damage to historical collections due to fires varied.

"Some of them were not damaged or intact, while others suffered varying levels of damage," he said.

The evacuation process was carried out by deploying a special team of experts to remove debris. The process, he continued, was still supervised and directed by the collection evacuation team in order to observe and take appropriate action regarding the process of lifting historical collections and burning building materials.

"Several heavy equipment and damage building roof lifting techniques are needed for the evacuation and rescue of collections of historical objects in affected rooms," he explained.

Previously, the Central Jakarta Metro Police also formed a joint team in handling fires at the Indonesian National Museum. The joint team came from the Forensic Laboratory Center, Polda investigators, Polres investigators and artifacts or history experts.

"At this time, we are evacuating historically valuables that we can still save. (the evacuation location of the remaining collection of objects affected by the fire) Later the team from the museum will determine (the location)," Kombes Komarudin told reporters.

Meanwhile, a team from the Forensic Laboratory (Labfor) is tasked with finding the origin of the hotspots.

"The Labfor team that observed the hotspots started from where," he said.