The director of District One of the Tehran Fire Department, who was at the scene early in the morning, said that experts are studying the cause of the fire. About 20 to 30 percent of the library’s books were destroyed in the blaze.
According to Mr. Jabbarzadeh, the fire burned an area of 200 square meters. It claimed no lives and there were no injuries since the fire broke out early in the morning when no one was in the building.
The extent of the damage to the library is still not clear, with experts hoping that its rare manuscripts are still intact.
Mohammad Arabzadeh, the director of the Fire Investigation Office of Tehran Province, said that the library was not equipped with a fire extinguishing system and did not have an alarm system either, which could have informed the Fire Department immediately.
Arabzadeh and a team of experts and advisors from the Tehran Fire Department had previously drafted a set of rules for safeguarding libraries, and he expressed his dissatisfaction with the fact that libraries are still not observing these rules.
The director of the Registration Department of the Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organization (CHTO) called the incident a cultural catastrophe, complaining, “The library is home to major Iranian manuscripts and inscriptions. It seems our libraries, as well as historical monuments, are not protected against such events.”
The library was one of the major libraries of
RM/ML/HG
End
MNA
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