Disaster preparedness and management priorities

Alan G. Howell <ahowell<-a t->ilanet< . >slnsw< . >gov< . >au> on behalf of Tegan Henderson

>A colleague I have works for a small institution in which management
>will not acknowledge disaster planning as a priority.

I've often thought that those of us involved in emergency
preparedness need to target managers and museum directors instead of
the usual conservators and collections managers, librarians and
archivists, who are already sold on the idea. Usually we're
"preaching to the converted".  I wish there was an easy way to
tackle this one.  Miguel Angel Corzo, director of the Getty
Conservation Institute said a few years ago (1990?) in a meeting for
American museum directors, that it was essential that directors get
involved in the plan, otherwise it just wouldn't happen. It has to
have the support of management.

One way to tackle the problem is to get  museum directors thinking
about museums (and I'm using the word "museum" as a generic term for
any cultural institution or historic site) as a business and how
much it would cost every day the building is closed; what it does to
their reputation as custodians of cultural heritage; how much it
costs to get up and running again; what services would be lost,
delayed, or affected etc.  The emergency preparedness literature
related to business says that 50% of all businesses affected by
disasters go under within two years, or are taken over by another
company. In some cases, businesses have more or less gone belly up
overnight.  While that may not be the case with museums who receive
government funding at federal, state, provincial or local level, it
may mean that operations have to be scaled down as a result of an
emergency, people fired, fewer services etc.  I think it is
important to stress the business resumption planning aspect of
emergency and disaster planning and do a business impact analysis.
What are your principal operations? What are your essential
services?  How long will it be before we can reopen, and to what
extent? etc., etc.

To give you an example, the fire at "Green Gables", the house in
Prince Edward Island where Lucy Maud Montgomery set "Anne of Green
Gables", is a major tourist attraction and consequently a major
source of income. The fire started about a month before tourist
season on the island and threatened to seriously affect the opening
of the house.  Fortunately, Parks Canada, which owns the property,
was able to restore much of the house in time for the tourist
season, so not losing the important revenue and the loss of
tourists.  Consider how much tourist revenue is going to be lost in
Assisi and its surroundings this year as a result of the
earthquakes.  There must also be statistics on the amount of revenue
lost in Britain a couple of years ago after tourists (particularly
American) stayed away because of the IRA bombings.

CCI Technical Bulletin No.18 "Fire Prevention Programs for Museums",
by Paul Baril, 1997, available from CCI  at $6.00 Cdn gives some
fire statistics for museums, art galleries and libraries in Canada
(from 1982 - 1993), taken from the Fire Commissioner's annual
report, which shows that losses were estimated to be over $3m. These
figures are real dollars, not adjusted to any base year, and do not
include collection losses. Paul Baril also includes the number of
fires over that same period (1990 was a good/bad year with
approximately 45 fires).  41% of all fires were arson, or suspected
arson; and 45% occurred between 7.00 pm and 5.00 am.

Here are some estimated costs of museums etc affected by disasters
in recent years (in millions of Canadian dollars):

    Fire - Weldon Law Library, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia,
    1985, $0.25m (cost of freeze-drying books);

    Fire -Royal Saskatchewan Museum, Regina, , 1990, $2m;

    Fire - Billings Estate Museum, Ottawa, 1992,  $0.125m;

    Fire - Windsor Castle,  1992, $60 - 80m;

    Terrorist bombing - Uffizi Art Gallery, Florence, 1992, $26m;

    Fire - Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, Hamilton, Ontario,
    1993, $3m (does not include cost of replacing  five historic
    planes at $1m each);

    Flood - Musee du Fjord, Ville de la Baie, Quebec, 1996, $1.2m
    (estimated cost of rebuilding walls and decontamination);

    Fire - Green Gable, Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, 1997,
    $2.3m.

Hope this gives you something to work with. Keep in touch. I'd be
interested to know how this works out.

David Tremain
Preventive Conservation Services, Canadian Conservation Institute

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 11:34
                 Distributed: Friday, October 10, 1997
                       Message Id: cdl-11-34-006
                                  ***