How museums fight fires, floods
As flames lit up the hills just across the freeway, torching mansions, the thousands of works of art in the Getty Center hung unperturbed. Nobody did anything to them. They didn’t have to.
The Getty’s bucolic setting on 750 acres of forested hills above Los Angeles would appear to expose it to the kinds of infernos still charring huge swaths of Southern California. But its setting is by design, part of an elaborate system of fireproofing to shield irreplaceable art as blazes bred by climate change pose a growing threat.
“The safest place for our collections, in the event of a fire, is right where it is,” museum spokesman Ron Hartwig said in a phone interview as he watched helicopters battle smoke and flames out his office window.
At the Getty Center, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, fire protection begins with the landscaping. Its lush, irrigated lawns and gardens form a moat-like barrier against any advancing blaze. The fortress-like walls of the buildings, designed by Richard Meier, are clad in fire-proof travertine, their windows protected by outdoor sprinklers that wash and cool the glass. The structures also incorporate the lessons of the 1994 Northridge earthquake, such as how to weld steel beams so the joints don’t crack under stress.
Inside, air-filtration systems purify and pressurize the atmosphere around the clock, especially when smoke or smog cloud the skies. (Even before last week’s Skirball fire broke out nearby, sparked at an encampment for the city’s growing number of homeless, the museum had closed its doors to visitors so as not to let smoke and ash from the region’s other blazes enter its buildings.) As a last resort, “dry pipe” sprinkler systems can douse flames without damaging art.
While wildfires plague the West, museums in such cities as Miami, Houston and New York must prepare for flooding and rising seas. In Washington, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened last year, needed special pumping systems and barriers since two-thirds of it is underground, exposed to seepage in fair weather and flooding in foul.