Fire at historic Russian library burns for 17 hours
Date February 1, 2015 - 3:06AM
[video=youtube;Qnuedg3VSiY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnuedg3VSiY[/video]
MOSCOW - A fire at one of Russia's largest public libraries has been raging for more than 17 hours, threatening to destroy thousands of rare documents.
The Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences in southwest Moscow went up in flames late on Friday.
The emergency situations ministry said in a statement on Saturday that more than 200 firefighters have been trying to put out the blaze ever since.
Yuri Pivovarov, the director of the institute that holds 10 million documents and texts, described the fire as a disaster.
He said in remarks on Russian television the extent of the damage was still unclear but the main storage which contained rare medieval Slavic texts did not seem to have been affected.
Pivovarov said only a fraction of the collection has been digitised.
