Fire rages for days in Kraków archive, destroying documents and raising safety questions

A fire raged for days this week at the municipal archives in Kraków before firefighters finally managed to extinguish it, and has probably destroyed all of the thousands of metres of documents stored at the site.

The incident has prompted questions about the design of the building, which was opened only two years ago amid claims that it met the highest safety standards. It is now believed that, in fact, the construction of the archive worsened the situation. Prosecutors have opened an investigation.

The fire broke out at the archives, located on the outskirts of Kraków, on Saturday evening and was only finally extinguished on Wednesday morning.

More than 40 firefighting units from Kraków and nearby areas responded to the emergency, but had trouble locating the source of the fire. Their task was made more difficult by cold temperatures and strong winds.

After failing to extinguish the flames with foam and fumigation, the firefighters moved to break through the building’s walls to pour water inside. On Monday they bulldozed a wall and deployed a drone with a thermal imaging camera to find the source of the heat.

Although no one was hurt in the blaze, it it likely that most of the 20,000 metres of documents stored in the building have been irreparably damaged. “Most likely everything has been destroyed,” the director of the archive, Paweł Pietrzyk, told Onet. “There may be nothing to save.”

Files stored at the site include municipal spatial plans as well as documentation of tenders. The archive was used to hold documents from all 40 units of Kraków’s city hall as well as 72 now defunct units. Local authorities have, however, assured that “historical documents” and often-accessed registry office documents are stored elsewhere.

District prosecutors, who have launched an inquiry into potential arson, will be looking through camera footage from the site to trace the chain of events that caused the emergency. On Monday, local police said there was “nothing to suggest” arson, and that “technical causes” seem more likely, reports Gazeta Wyborcza.

The fire came as a surprise given that the city’s new archives have only been in use since 2019. At the time of the building’s opening, local authorities boasted about its modern security and monitoring systems.

At its unveiling in June 2018, the city’s mayor, Jacek Majchrowski, said, that the “beautiful, modern” structure was “the first local government archive to be built anew” to meet “increasingly restrictive rules on file storage”.

“We used the most modern technologies,” said Janina Pokrywa, head of the city’s municipal investment board. “Our halls are deprived of light. Light is one of the worst destroyers of paper. Therefore, we have installed devices that maintain the right humidity and temperature of the air, as well as of course dry extinguishing installations.”

However, it seems to have been the building’s much-touted design that was the stumbling block for firefighters who struggled to bring heavy equipment into the building.

“The entrance to the hall is through one door, there are also no windows. That is why yesterday for two hours we had to demolish part of the wall to introduce the equipment,” said Sebastian Woźniak, spokesman for the provincial fire department headquarters.

Local councillors from the Law and Justice (PiS) party – which rules at national level but not in opposition-controlled Kraków – have sent a set of five questions asking about how the fire came about and which safety measures were in place as well as what documents were affected and whether they were previously digitalised or copied.

Daria Gosek-Popiołek, a local MP from Razem, a left-wing party, has called for those responsible – either through failures of security or poor planning of the buildings – to be identified and “consequences drawn for them.”

She added that she hopes that the city’s authorities have “taken care” to keep digital copies of documents, such as building permits and tender documents.

Local city activists have also complained that high-ranking authorities played down the severity of the fire and only appeared on the scene days after it broke out. “It’s a mockery. Jacek Majchrowski showed up only on Sunday after lunch. The Lesser Poland provincial governor, Łukasz Kmita, only on Monday,” one told Wirtualna Polska.

Main image credit: Jakub Wlodek/Agencja Gazeta

Maria Wilczek

Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.