What a Vault Fire Actually Takes with It
Launch library · evergreen read
Storage vaults built to protect film reels have, across the medium's long history, occasionally caught fire themselves, the very instability of early film stock turning a place of preservation into a site of sudden, catastrophic and often total loss for an entire collection stored there together under one roof.
The scale of destruction in such incidents is difficult to overstate, since a single vault could house years of accumulated work, entire careers and productions reduced to ash within hours despite every reasonable precaution taken beforehand by careful, conscientious staff working to protect the collection from exactly this outcome.
These losses shaped how later archives approached storage entirely, spreading collections across multiple sites and adopting stricter climate and material controls learned directly from past disaster and hard experience. The history of film preservation, in this sense, is also a history of hard lessons absorbed only after something irreplaceable had already been lost forever to a single afternoon.