In the end of January, the townhall of Junglinster caught fire. The interior of the old farmhouse which had housed the commune since 2016, burned down, and it took 90 firefighters hours to extinguish the fire. The roof collapsed into the municipal archives and got fuelled by loads of paper to burn. On Local Matters this week, we take this as a reason to talk about archiving. The commune of Junglinster had two rooms dedicated to the municipal archives. One of them, the one on the first floor of the burnt building, now looks devastated. Every single centimetre of the room, the walls, the floor, the furniture is burnt. The public relations officer of the Junglinster municipality shows me around the burnt town hall.
The entire building smells like a smokehouse, and workers in white suits and with facemasks remove the debris from the building.
Daniel Wampach says: “Everything here has collapsed; the roof panels fell into the rooms. That’s how the archive looks like. Everything is burnt. The epicentre of the fire was here.” He shows me the former archive on the first floor. Workers have built a new temporary roof to keep the rain from causing more damage. Once they have removed all the debris and secured the structure, the municipality hopes to renovate the building. If this will be possible, isn’t clear yet, Daniel Wampach says.
Currently, the municipal services for the residents are sheltered in the previous townhall building a kilometre away. Until 2016, this was the main building of the municipality before. Municipal officers now share offices with colleagues and have moved several times during the past weeks, others have been working from home.
Even the second building behind the commune has been damaged in the fire, not by flames but by water. This new building was inaugurated less than a year ago. Now, six weeks after the fire, the luminous hallway on the ground floor ais flanked by industrial dehumidifiers as the structure of the building, the basement was flooded during the firefighters operation. Currently the municipality is planning on renting offices in a new building to allow the administration to work without disruption until a permanent building is found.
The most important however, no one was injured during the fire. And even most of the municipal archives survived the blaze. While a few irrelevant papers such as checks and documentation of old projects were destroyed, the most important parts of the archive were saved. The most relevant documents were stored on the ground floor on the other side of the building. During the blaze, the municipal secretary and the mayor entered the building to get the documents out of there – historical documents of cultural value, important administrative papers. Now, some of the documents are wet or dirty, others smell very bad, but they are safe.
The municipality building had provisions to protect the archives from fire, the municipal engineers say. The rooms had a certain protection against flames included - but it took the firefighters in Junglinster nearly 15 hours to extinguish the fire due to its tricky location under the roof. No protection installations can withstand such a long pressure.
The communes mostly work alone on their archiving tasks. There is little collaboration, and for many smaller communes, only recently, more attention has been brought to the importance of archiving. Archiving is not a priority for small communes with only a few employees. The municipality of Junglinster will now have to screen what was damaged in how far.
Other municipalities have reacted. The archivist in the southern commune of Pétange Laetitia Junk started working on an emergency plan. The commune of Pétange already has a general emergency plan. But Laetitia Junk wants to draft a more specific plan for the archives. She wants to determine what to save first in case of a fire, flood, or any other disaster. It’s always people before paper, she makes clear. But then, which documents are the most relevant? Such a plan has been part of her to-do-list since she started the position last summer. After the fire in Junglinster, the project climbed up the latter of her priorities.
The commune of Pétange is one of a handful of southern communes to have signed a cooperation contract with the National Archives. With this contract, Laetitia Junk hopes to get support on how to classify archives, questions like which documents need to be archived, which can be binned. The archivist in Pétange through this cooperation becomes part of a network to support each other.