Fire on Rapa Nui Irreparably Damages Moai Statues

The iconic Moai statues on Easter Island, traditionally known as Rapa Nui, have been left “totally charred” following a fire on the remote Pacific island. The fire blazed through more than 250 acres of the UNESCO World Heritage site and “irreparably” damaged many of the giant, ancient statues.

While some sources initially reported the cause as a volcano fire, Rapa Nui’s mayor, Pedro Edmunds Paoa, believes it was intentional, telling newscasters that all fires on the island are caused by humans. If it was indeed arson, the perpetrator permanently damaged statues that were nearly a thousand years old – the first being carved around 1100 C.E.

According to Paoa, the fire probably sped up the rocks’ natural degradation and erosion process, already precarious due to their age and the porous nature of the volcanic rock they’re made from. Archaeologists and scientists have documented more than 800 moai around the island but suspect there could be several hundred more yet undiscovered. Debate over the statues’ purpose(s) remains ongoing, as some theorize they represented past chiefs while others suspect the Polynesians used them to mark sources of fresh water on the island.

The park and island are now closed to visitors, another blow to Rapa Nui’s heavily tourist-based economy. Due to COVID-19, tourism had been restricted over the past few years and the island had only recently re-opened at the start of August.

Now, Paoa maintains that the only way to protect the site from vandals is to have permanent guards around the moai and Rano Raraku volcanic crater, the latter being the site of the most fire damage. He also insinuated that the absenteeism of Chile’s government and their apathy toward Rapa Nui, the world’s most remote inhabited island, allowed for the alleged arson.

Over the last week, social media mentions of the island spiked aggressively on Oct. 9, shortly after global news sources like Reuters broke the news. People online expressed heartbreak over the fire and its damage, while also rightfully pointing out there was much less news coverage than there was for a similar fire-based disaster, at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2019.

And they had a point. 42.9K of the total 44.5K mentions of “Easter Island” and “Rapa Nui” in a one-week timespan stemmed from Twitter, with minimal conversations and traffic coming from traditional news sources or news sites. In comparison, Notre Dame was mentioned 12.76 million times in a similar one-week timespan surrounding its fire. While certainly not to lessen the significance of the damage incurred at Notre Dame, this clear disparity in news coverage demonstrates that the world’s eyes still avoid the global south.

According to a Twitter user whose location is marked as Chile, the Chilean media did not even share this news immediately.

Translation: “1. Why did they not put this on the news in Chile? 2. It’s called Rapa Nui.”

The Copernicus, the EU Space Programme’s Earth Observation facet, shared a picture of the fire damage and burn scar from space. Hopefully the island’s environment and economy are able to recover quickly, and Paoa and his investigators can apprehend the culprits.

Original story on the SMLC Blog.