fire is terrifying and devastating at the best of times for all the good it's
done mankind it's never been all that easy to control especially
when it starts unintentionally or maliciously we do our best to prepare for fire and
we have tools and techniques to stop it quickly but the road to the fiery depths of hell
is paved with good intentions and sometimes the destruction is absolutely staggering
let's think about fire it doesn't care what anything's worth it will destroy it all the same
it just so happens that sometimes the value of what's lost is absolutely astronomical
10. a banksy most of us who are not in the art world probably could name a number of historical
greats like picasso michelangelo and monet but when we get closer to the present knowledge of
big name artists tends to wane a bit in fact there's a good chance most people are only
going to be able to name a small handful at most and of all modern artists you could argue
none is as famous as banksy to this day no one is entirely sure who banks he is rumors abound
of course but nothing is confirmed famous for his street art he's been around since the 1990s
and has definitely made a reputation for himself an original banksy that shredded on purpose sold
for over 25 million dollars in 2021. shredded art can at least be reassembled but burned art
has well less appeal in march 2021 another banksy was set ablaze the piece had originally sold for
the relatively bargained basement price of 95 000 then it was burned by the buyers on purpose
on camera a digital version of the painting was then sold as an nft for 380 000 so was
the painting worth 95 000 or was it worth 380 000 it probably doesn't matter anymore since only the
nft is left 9. fox film vault in 1937 fox studios lost the bulk of their silent film archive to fire
film used to be produced on what was known as nitrate film cellulose that had been treated with
potassium nitrate and sulfuric acid it made for very high quality film but it was highly volatile
and tended to burst into flame when it got too warm the problem with nitrate film was that it
burned hot and was incredibly hard to put out too if it was started it was gonna keep on burning it
also produces its own oxygen when it burns so you can keep it burning even underwater fox studios
had kept the bulk of their old film in an archive that had not been properly ventilated once
they caught fire nearly every silent film that they'd produced from 1932 and earlier was lost
hundreds of thousands of feet of film were destroyed and one person lost their life
in the blaze while others were injured they pegged the value at what was lost at around 200 000
at the time in today's money that's about 3.8 million dollars not to mention the historical
value of many films that were never seen again number eight 100 million dollars in jim beam
keeping inventory in a warehouse always seems like a good idea right until it isn't jim beam makers
of world famous bourbon probably never anticipated that their kentucky bourbon warehouse was going
to catch fire back in 2019 and even if they had planned for it odds are no one predicted it was
going to result in the loss of 45 000 barrels of booze the fire started late at night in the
facility where the company aged their bourbon as you know alcohol and fire get along a little too
well and the resulting fire burned with such fury that firefighters were all but helpless against it
it was so hot it melted the lights on the fire trucks when they parked nearby about nine million
liters of bourbon was lost most of it burned but a massive quantity also ran out into the kentucky
river as well losses were pegged at around 100 million dollars 7. 400 million worth of hash hash
is meant to be smoked so burning it doesn't sound like that big of a deal however hash is generally
smoked in manageable doses for personal use rather than in massive piles in an effort to escape law
enforcement back in 2013 smugglers off the coast of malta were carrying 30 tons of hash ash is a
gummy substance that most folks refer to as resin it's made from marijuana it's usually formed into
blocks 30 tons of it would have had a street value of around 400 million dollars the crew of
the ship was 30 miles offshore when they realized italian authorities were on the way to meet them
unable to think of a less stunning escape plan the crew set their stash ablaze
6. 1.2 million an art from the louvre the louvre in france is arguably the most famous museum in
the world it's the place where the mona lisa hangs after all along with the eiffel tower
it's the place to visit in paris and if you added up the value of the art held inside it'd be worth
45.5 billion dollars you'd think that the people who run the museum would be pretty cautious about
where their art goes and how it's treated and they probably are but sometimes things still
slip through the cracks mostly unintentionally after all how could anyone at the louvre have
known that the art they loaned the maritime museum on the island of tadaho was going to
go up in flames because museums are all about art appreciation it's not unheard of for them to loan
pieces to other museums where they can be enjoyed by new art appreciators three such paintings won
by alexander cassatti and two by anonymous dutch painters were destroyed when the maritime museum
caught fire after a lightning strike along with about 200 of the museum's own works
5. millions of dollars worth of rare cars some people like to collect comic books others collect
decorative spoons and for a certain group of people collecting the most rare and expensive
cars on earth helps to pass the time that's what someone was doing in the quaintly named
village of overpiour in the uk where they had managed to build a collection that included
rare cars from aston martin clarendon porsche lamborghini and ferrari in fact one of the cars
was an exceptionally rare ferrari laferrari that was worth around 1.6 million dollars alone only
499 of the cars were ever made and you can find someone sale today for nearly 4 million
more significant than the fact that there are cars that are worth more than most people will make in
a lifetime is the fact that someone else burned them all to ash the collection was stored near
a barn and there were 80 rare vehicles in total held in two buildings that loss was no accident
either as someone set the fire on purpose reports said that one vehicle which was not identified
was worth 4 million alone no word on whether anyone was ever caught for the arson or the
total value of the cars lost but if there were 80 of them including things like a rare jaguar xj-220
and an aston martin zagato it's safe to assume that the total loss was in the tens of millions
number a 20 million pair of yachts given their proximity to water it's almost ironic how
dangerous fire can be on a boat but any serious boater will tell you fire is the last thing you
want to see at sea just ask whoever owned the pair of 20 million yachts that burned in 2019.
the fire was called the biggest fire loss in fort lauderdale history by the fire battalion chief
and it's no wonder the two yachts were docked for some repairs and the first fire started on
one before spreading to the other the first was a massive 161-foot long vessel while the second
was 106 feet in length officials think it started in the larger vessel valued at somewhere north of
16 million dollars by itself and then spread to the other which just had the misfortune
of being docked in the same place speculation was that the fire might have been arson some
kind of insurance scam but that was not the case surveillance footage confirmed that the fire was
just an accident exacerbated by high winds number three the chateau de triomphe the housing market
is almost impossible to understand the same house on one side of the country could cost
10 times more than it costs on the other side you get a nice three-bedroom house for the same price
as a one-bedroom apartment sometimes it seems to be a bit of nonsense but there is one hard and
fast rule that you can count when it comes to determining house values if a house has a name
it's worth a lot of money case in point the chateau de triumph in dallas texas built on 10
acres the mansion was owned by a man who made his fortune in international mining the 75 000 square
foot property was meant to be an investment that the owner bought before it was even finished he
planned to pay for the remaining construction then sell it the mansion was listed for sale at 44.9
million dollars thanks to an electrostatic air cleaner sparking to life around some paint and
solvent fumes in the house the entire thing burned to the ground in 2003 this resulted in a lawsuit
because there was no fire break in the attic and the sprinkler system was allegedly poorly designed
2. the umg catalog sometimes a fire can destroy things in a way that causes a layered loss
the financial cost is one part of it but it can also be a loss of uniqueness of the thing
that was destroyed if it's a content of a building like furniture and appliances
that can be devastating but it's generally replaceable when universal music lost a massive
portion of their music catalog that had not just a financial toll but a cultural and historic one
in 2008 a fire destroyed an enormous archive of musical master recordings these were the
original and more perfect and clear recordings of the music of tens of thousands of musicians
the problem with this story is that universal has refused to be clear about what happened even more
than a decade later the new york times initially reported that as much as 175 000 archived items
were destroyed the manager of the vault claimed as many as 500 000 tracks were lost universal
quickly counted that by saying that nothing of the sort had happened and that they had backups
of almost everything lost they changed their story several times settling on significant damage but
not as much as the times reported at one point they claimed only 22 masters were destroyed and
that's not so bad universal claimed insurance filings and lawsuits that upwards of 17
000 artists lost recordings in the fire they were continually evasive over naming who
and what was lost instead they suggested that those were just potentially lost assets and
then they finally identified 19 artists who lost back material including beck nirvana and
brian adams among others it's hard to say how many things were definitively destroyed since lawsuits
are still ongoing to this day and universal has been less than transparent whatever the
case there were definitely some historical tracks as well as other recordings including speeches
by martin luther king jr that were lost and can never be reproduced one the library of alexandria
the library of alexandria is famous for being a repository of historical knowledge and arguably
the greatest library in history so the loss of the information it must have held represents a loss of
books and documents and information that holds value far beyond money no doubt the things held
within would have been worth a monetary fortune as well if it had survived but it was not meant to be
and so the library was burned the real question is which burning did the most damage because people
really hated that library the library managed to last far longer than people realize it
was around for around a thousand years that's probably older than most libraries we'll ever
get and in that time it was ransacked looted and burned several times the most famous burning was
probably at the hands of julius caesar back in 48 bc caesar came to alexandria and was met with
resistance by the egyptians caesar opted to burn the fleet in the harbor to teach them a lesson and
the fire spread through the city burning about 10 percent of the library fast forward about 400
years and thea phil has converted the temple of serapis to a christian church a large quantity
of the library's books were held in the temple and were then burned as a result by 640 californ took
alexandria and it said that they used books at the library to fuel the fires of the bath houses
burning them for six straight months needless to say regardless of who burned the most of the
library over the course of several hundred years it's clear a lot of unique and one-of-a-kind works
would have been lost forever so i really hope you found this video interesting if you did
please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and thank you for watching