Ingolstadt, fire hits storerooms of Deutsches Museum, the world's largest science museum. Massive damage is feared

A heavy fire, which broke out late on Wednesday, October 10, affected the storage facilities of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, which are based in the city of Ingolstadt, located about eighty kilometers north of Munich. Eight thousand objects are located in the repository: no personal injuries are reported, but at the moment, however, it is not known in what state the collection is in, as law enforcement agencies were unable to enter the facility due to the risk of collapse after the fire. For the same reason, the causes that triggered the event are not yet known.

However, according to initial estimates, the damage does not appear to have affected the entirety of the warehouses, however extensive it appears to be. “We do not expect a loss of all eight thousand objects in the collection,” Gerrit Faust of the museum’s press office explained in an official note. Extensive evaluations will be needed to learn more: the economic damage, the museum says, is significant, however, and the building housing the repository is currently uninhabitable. The museum’s director, Wolfgang M. Heckl, merely said he was at least relieved that the fire caused no personal injury, and thanked the Ingolstadt fire department for its work.

The Deutsches Museum in Munich, one of Germany’s most visited museums with more than a million visitors each year, is also the world’s largest museum of science and technology and boasts a collection of some 28,000 objects. Its ancient history begins in 1903, when it was founded at the instigation of engineer Oskar von Miller. The vast collection aims to explore every aspect of the sciences: engineering, physics, transportation science, mineralogy, chemistry, pharmacy, aeronautics, computer science, telecommunications, and more. In the Ingolstadt repository, the most important item was probably the microscope of Manfred Heigen, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967.

Pictured is the Ingolstadt depot after the fire. Ph. Credit Deutsches Museum

Ingolstadt, fire hits storerooms of Deutsches Museum, the world's largest science museum. Massive damage is feared

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