[skookumchuck]

That would only be true if the risk of fire is evenly distributed, which it obviously isn't, and that a museum burning down now and then would not motivate better protections for the rest.

In any case, the strategy they chose obviously didn't work and they lost it 100%.

[knlinux]

It probably isn’t but it’s safe to assume that this location was at least around the median in terms of fire risk (this location had probably better infrastructure than the average Brazilian city), so the fact that there might be less risky locations doesn’t change much since you’ll then have places with higher risk, where the collection will have burned down even sooner. Even if you knew the best location with the least hazard, optimally you would still want to move all collections there anyway.

The strategy didn’t work since any strategy was likely deemed for failure due lack of funding, not because it was suboptimal.