BRIDGETOWN, Barbados – Barbados' government says it is working swiftly to put steps in place to recover any available documents from the Tuesday’s devastating fire that swept through a block of the colonial-era building housing the country’s archives.
Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office with responsibility for culture Senator Dr Shantal Munro-Knight (centre) being comforted at the scene of the fire.The blaze, believed to have been sparked by a lightning strike, ravaged Block D, a two-storey building housing the archives department’s repository in Black Rock, St Michael.
Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office with responsibility for Culture, Dr. Shantal Munro-Knight, said that efforts are underway to determine the way forward for the Department, which include securing the existing building and any materials that could be retrieved and identifying mitigation strategies to prevent a recurrence.
She said that the documents stored at the building include historical court proceedings, the Court of Chancery Records, newspaper, official gazettes, vestry records, among others. However, Munro-Knight stressed that the main building, where locals and visitors would come to do their research, had not been affected.
“We were in the process of working with the Fire Service and we have gone as far as to have an engineering firm that was doing an assessment of the Archives to mitigate against an unforeseen circumstance like this.
“Unfortunately, we’ve had the occurrence, and as I said, the plan was to begin to migrate the records and then the intent is, by this November, to break ground for a new archives building. As part of the construction process, we would look at all the things in terms of hurricane resistance, fire suppression and all of those things. All of those plans are in train.
“So, it’s a bit unfortunate that we’ve had this circumstance, but we are seeing now how we can move forward as much as possible. As soon as the fire officials give the all clear, the team would then be moving in to see if there’s any material, for instance, anything that was stored in cabinets that can also be retrieved,” Munro-Knight added.
She said that while the fire while a setback, would not delay the government’s plan to digitise the records and build out an archival economy and that two weeks ago, a number of bound records had been moved as part of the Department’s continuing digitisation process.
“We had started to digitise the records, so it is about how quickly now we can move the records out and continue with that process. So, it is a blow, in the sense that we’ve lost some very important records, but we will evaluate and move forward.
“I think it just gives us a greater impetus now to really push ahead with the plans for how we protect our records…. We started with the Transatlantic Slave records, some of which as I said before were already digitised and in the process of being digitised and that allows us then to go ahead even as we assess what has been lost.”
