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GeneralNatural disaster and willful destruction of mineral collections and dealer stock

13th Nov 2018 00:48 UTCBob Harman

As I post this on the eve of November 12, 2018, the state of California is in the midst of yet another major wildfire disaster. This year is just the latest in a several year series of major western US wildfire seasons. I just watched both trailer homes and million dollar homes in Malibu incinerated within minutes.The last 2 years have also seen several major hurricanes in the US (and elsewhere as well). The hurricane in Houston Texas in 2017 brought unprecedented flooding to large areas of that part of Texas. Recent tornadoes and earthquakes.....who knows??

I, personally know of 1 significant Houston collection destroyed by the 2017 hurricane's flooding. I also personally know of 2 messy divorces,

1 purposely damaging a significant collection and the other destroying a well known Midwest dealer's stock housed in a shed that was purposely burned down. These natural disasters along with the willful destruction of mineral collections and dealer stocks prompts me to ask whether other mindat users have any experiences with this sort of collection or dealer stock destruction? CHEERS.....BOB

13th Nov 2018 01:31 UTCRuss Rizzo Expert

Bob,

I think you should delete most of the second paragraph. This is not the place for gossip and no one who has been through such an experience wants to re-live it here.

Cheers...

13th Nov 2018 02:39 UTCBob Harman

RUSS, I see your point and, of course, no names were ever expected to be mentioned. But let's confine the thread to natural disasters damaging or destroying a collection or a dealer's stock. Anyone know of an instance such as this? CHEERS.......BOB

13th Nov 2018 02:54 UTCRuss Rizzo Expert

I don't remember if it was the shop or some of the sheds out back; but a once prominent dealer from Arkansas had a tornado take out a portion of his inventory.

13th Nov 2018 09:24 UTCAlfredo Petrov Manager

Rock Currier accumulated statistics on the destiny of many historic collections and found to his surprise that around 10% had been destroyed by fires, although I suppose most of those were house fires back in the days when everyone had wood-burning stoves, candles, gas lanterns and the like, so they might not qualify for a "natural disaster" thread. Fires are thankfully less common in homes than they used to be.

Off on a bit of a tangent, but how many mineral species do you think can survive a house fire? Turns out it's very few. You can sift out your native platinum nuggets unharmed from the ashes, but most of the rest of your minerals will have melted, burned, shattered, pulverized or otherwise decomposed. And if the fire department arrives on time to put the fire out, they'll cause almost as much damage wth their water jets as the fire would have done. Dr Steve Chamberlain wrote an interesting guide about attempts to recover from smoke and water damage after his rock barn caught fire.

13th Nov 2018 12:15 UTCLarry Maltby Expert

I think that you can insure almost anything. You may be able to get a “rider” on your home owner’s policy that specifically insures your collection. It would probably require a professional appraisal and a stiff addition to the cost of your policy.

In 1976 I happened to be the display chairman on the show committee for the Greater Detroit Gem and Mineral Show. For the United States Bicentennial, the Michigan Mineralogical Society wanted to bring the Ontonagon Boulder back to Michigan for a display at the show. Early in the morning we flew to Washington, rented a truck and the Smithsonian loaded the boulder on the truck. I then had to sign to take the responsibility for returning the boulder to the Smithsonian. I was relieved to find out that the boulder was insured by the Lloyd’s of London. When you think about it, if we had a wreck with the truck, the almost 4,000 lb. copper boulder would have been salvageable. It already had a row of chisel marks on it and some letters carved into it, a few more bump marks would have just added to it's history.

13th Nov 2018 13:44 UTCRolf Luetcke Expert

I had posted not long ago the fire in Brazils national museum that destroyed their collection. Of course much more than minerals were destroyed in that fire. I have often wondered how many collection were destroyed in wars but that is hard to document.

A fire I witnessed in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona and visiting mines afterwards showed how the material on the dumps was altered deep into the pieces I broke on the dumps. At home under the microscope you could easily see the fire had melted the minerals into things I didn't recognize.

13th Nov 2018 22:23 UTCHolger Hartmaier 🌟

I think the article Alfredo is referring to is " Mineral Specimen Mortality", by Wendell Wilson and Rock Currier, published in the July/August 2001, Mineralogical Record Magazine, Vol 32, No. 4, pages 329-340. An interesting read. I had the same concerns as Bob after hearing about all the destructive events going on across the country.

14th Nov 2018 04:47 UTCD Mike Reinke

I've dropped a few favorite pieces of mine just by handling them a lot, and being "butterfingered" it seems. Those were disasters to me, if not 'natural'. What percentage is lost that way?! More subtle, but cumulative.

D Mike Reinke

14th Nov 2018 07:23 UTCFrank K. Mazdab 🌟 Manager

Not a natural disaster, but perhaps a unique anthropogenic one:

Back in the mid-1990s, a mine-geologist acquaintance of mine sent me a box of what he thought might be a new mineral... beautiful yellowish plates to 2-3 mm richly covering some altered rock, from Cripple Creek. The crystals looked like mini autunites, but microprobe analysis showed them to be a hydrous strontium uranyl vanadate, a new combination of elements at the time and so indeed a new mineral (but since recently rediscovered as yellow micro-crystalline crusts in Texas, and subsequently named finchite).

I stored the box of rocks adjacent to my office door (so also adjacent to the large crack under the door, in part mindful of filling my tiny poorly-ventilated office with radon, and also next to the waste paper basket). One day when I arrived at my office, the box was gone. Theft seemed unlikely, and after some asking around, I discovered that a new member of the custodial staff had seen the box by the door, assumed it was waste too big for the waste paper basket, and simply thrown it out. So, somewhere buried in the Tucson landfill is a now rotted cardboard box enclosing what may have been the largest and most spectacular crystals of finchite ever discovered (assuming the crystals haven't since altered to something else in the intervening 20 years). Fortunately I had pulled out a few specimens from that box for analytical purposes (but sadly not the largest or showiest ones), so a few still exist (and one I finally photographed and uploaded here). The original locality is apparently no longer accessible because it was filled in during subsequent mining, but a friend of mine who works at Cripple Creek said the area was being mined again, and so perhaps there's hope for new Colorado finchites in the future..

27th Nov 2018 01:01 UTCToby Billing

I have not lost any other than a few minor items that slipped out of my fingers over the years but it is a serious concern here in a very bushfire prone part of Australia. The big Victorian fires of a few years ago took out a couple of collections sadly.

We are working on the new display shed, it is as fire resistant as possible with multi-layered steel and fireproof insulation and will be bare gravel and concrete around it but nothing is ever 100% safe obviously.

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