The bulding was undergoing a renovation.
Old building + hot work = frequent fires.
This is how Notre Dam burned. It's how the old Capitol building in Iowa burned. It's how the Yonkers building burned. If you don't like it, the answer isn't to blame a secret cabal that wants to destroy history. THE ANSWER IS TO STOP IMPORTING FUCKING INCOMPETENT IMMIGRANT CONSTRUCTION WORKERS.
It's not a coincidence at all. It had a verdigris roof. Repairs to sheet copper are usually done with lead as a patching compound. It can be easily worked with a torch. But with very old wood, it's pretty easy to ignite something on the other side of the copper, which is a very good thermal conductor.
Ok, fair, but my point was more that if that is the case, why don't they have extra precautions in place in case of fire. Like, if it is that easy for this to happen again, why wasn't there a fuck-tonne of extra preventative measures in place..?
And then there's the question of them leaving all the valuable art inside, during the restoration. Like sure, they obviously didn't plan for this, but I can assure you that would never happen, with an art collection that valuable, in Australia. It just wouldn't. This is why we have temperature and humidity-controlled archives, for precisely this reason...
I'm mostly just appalled at the lack of preventative measures taken once again, more than I am thinking this is some sort of conspiracy...
So for me, while yes the roof thing is obviously the same as Notre Dame, the better comparison would be with the National Museum in Rio, which didn't even have a working sprinkler system (cost), thus resulting in the greatest loss of scientific and historical artifacts this century...
Notre Dame is more iconic than either of the others, but in terms of "cultural loss", it's probably the least important of the three, depending how much art was still in the Stock Exchange building at the time...