 Today I am so pleased to welcome Martha, Fatal Jackson, she is the Chief Curator of the Division of State Historic Sites and Properties in North Carolina and she's kindly agreed to share with us a case study featuring the Thomas Wolf Memorial and how this cultural institution recovered after a devastating fire. Martha, thank you so much for joining us. Would you mind sharing a little bit about yourself with our audience today? Okay, Jenny at the time of the fire I was registrar for the North Carolina Division of State Historic Sites. We managed 24 sites across the state. Julie Bledsoe, now Thomas, was the curator for the Western Region and we were actually wrapping up an inventory of the artifacts in the boarding house which is also called Old Kentucky Home because we were preparing to remove all the artifacts and store them while the house had intrusion and smoke alarms installed along with other repairs. So I spent the next six years of my life tracking and photographing the artifacts, helping arrange for conservation, updating records and coordinating the reinstallation of the artifacts from the house until it reopened to the public in late May 2004. Great, thank you, Martha. So before I hand things completely over to you I just wanted to ask two poll questions from our audience just to get a better sense of where you're coming from. So here's our basic question, what type of institution are you coming from today and we know we can't cover them all so if you're other feel free to share in the chat box where you're coming from. And then our our second question here is just have you also experienced at your institution a disaster or an emergency such as a fire? Yes or no and then of course in the chat box feel free to explain your situation or share your story with the other participants. Like webinars in the past we'll use these poll questions as our door prize so we'll pull two names at random of people who've answered the question and you guys will win a fantastic resource from our bookshelf but I do have to say you have to be a member of the online community so that I can find your email. So it looks like you guys are coming from all over the place and fortunately most of you 72% say no you haven't experienced a disaster which is great but seven of you have. So let me get rid of these and Martha I'm going to pull your PowerPoint over and then I'll hand things over to you. Okay while she's doing that I do want to thank a couple of people for helping me with images Sarah Beth Lee at the Thomas Wolf Memorial and also Marlene Menchew at the North Carolina Transportation Museum. Just to give you a little bit of background Thomas Clayton more Thomas Clayton Wolf was born in Asheville North Carolina on October 3rd 1900 his parents were W.O. who was a two-son cutter and his mother was Julia Wolf who was a business woman in Asheville. They lived in a house on Whippen Street and he was the youngest of four brothers and three sisters and in 1906 Julia bought an 18-room boarding house there was a couple of blocks away and she ended up moving into the house and she took Tom with her at the time he was about six years old in 1916 she added 16 more rooms to the house for a total of 29 rooms. Tom didn't have a room of his own so he kind of wandered around and slept wherever he could find a bed as you can see he's surrounded by these lovely ladies. He was quite brilliant and went on to go to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill at the age of 15 as you can see he's rather easy to spot he was six six so he's a very tall person he was very involved in the Carolina Playmakers Theater on campus here he is shown playing in the play Black Gavin. We went on to the Harvard Graduate School after graduation graduating from Carolina and majored in playwriting during that time his father died after he graduated from Harvard he moved to New York City and taught at New York University for six years traveling to Europe during that time he enjoyed his first success with his novel which was originally titled Oh Lost Charles Krippner's Son Purchased the Rights in 1928 and renamed it Look Homeward Angel. He went on to write numerous plays and novels and short stories making frequent trips to Europe here he is shown getting on a plane in Berlin and he went home a few times actually his first trip home he was almost run out of town because Look Homeward Angel was largely autobiographical in nature and he even though he changed the names of the characters it was very easy to figure out who he based his characters on in town. He died at the age of 38 of tubercular meningitis after a trip out west after Tom's death Julia continued to operate the boarding house until her death in 1945 and then the city of Asheville purchased the house in 1949 and opened it to the public as a literary shrine and then they sold it to the state of North Carolina in 1975 the old Kentucky home was designated a national historic landmark in 1973 and if you've never read the book Look Homeward Angel the house itself is considered a character in the novel so nearly 15 years ago a little over 15 years ago this is what the house looked like and at some point early in the morning of July 24 somebody broke a window in the dining room and set the curtains on fire we don't know exactly how long it burned before somebody noticed it and finally called it in the Asheville fire department battled the blaze for several hours while people gathered and watched and cried this is Steve Hill he was the site manager at the time and I want you to notice his dark hair Steve is is actually one of the heroes he managed the project from beginning to end and did a fantastic job he walked into the very first meeting of all the planners and conservators and curators and and he said by the time this thing is finished I want to be able to walk in the house and not be able to tell that there was a fire this is the the view I've seen from the Renaissance Hotel which is right next door I think it's important to note that while the when you have a fire the fire department is actually in control of your property they will let you know how far to stay back they'll let you know when you can go on the property so this is a really good time to begin planning figure out what you're going to do set up your teams and so forth T the Asheville community started pouring in offers of help right away so there was an offer of free warehouse space just a few blocks away so that all the furniture could be moved there and Steve took the time to arrange for a fence to be placed around the property and tarp for the house he wanted to prevent further vandalism and theft of souvenirs this is the side of the house that near the dining room and then I apologize for the quality of the picture next to it it was taken it appeared in the Asheville citizen's time that is Julie Bledsoe Thomas the curator hugging Steve and there were lots of tears shed that day I can assure you I was actually in the western excuse me the eastern part of the state when this happened and we figured out that by the time I got there it would be pretty much set up for the day so I actually returned to Raleigh the next day and began going through photographs and negatives of the interior of the house because we had actually planned the next week to have every room in the house photographed every wall so that we could when we when all the alarm systems and repairs were done that we could put everything back the way it was so I ended up making a notebook for the first floor and for the second floor and those photographs really stood us in good stead although we didn't have every room in every corner so Steve put out a plea for the Asheville community and visitors that they had any interior shots that they could share with us and so we were able to put together almost the entire interior of the house to kind of orient people this is a floor plan of that first floor and the the pointer I'm using the pointer this is the front door this is the entry hall this is the room that is right next to the dining room this is this is where the fire started the door to this room was shut because we were storing some furniture in it and actually when the people first opened up the door the next that day they were surprised because it looked like nothing was touched we did find out later there was a very thin film of ash and debris so everything in the room did have to be cleaned but not nearly to the extent of the rest of it this is the kitchen this is all the hallway between the kitchen and the dining room and this is the children's dining room and this is what we call the drunken hallway so we'll get back to that a little bit later this is the dining room before the fire the fire actually started in this area this is a sideboard that was close to the room to the point of origin this is the dining room after the fire and again this is the the area that started out there's a huge hole here so that was was the point of origin the as you can see that's a better shot of the hole the this is the dining room shortly after it was cleaned up we actually found artifacts that fell through the hole so show you that in a few minutes this was the fireplace in the dining room you can see the the blue tile surrounding the opening there was also a blue tile hearth this is one of the survivors from the dining room it was on that sideboard it was displayed standing up in a stand and actually rolled off the the sideboard and fell through the hole so a lot of the plating was burned off but at least it survived unfortunately this one did not survive this was a beverage set that w o gave julia for their 25th wedding anniversary we found blobs of melted silver in the basement directly below so we did manage to recover part of it but unfortunately they're just blobs um here is a shot of the ashville fire department with their water cannon they really waited as long as they could firemen went into the house and grouped picture i mean grouped furniture in the room as you can see here they they went through a few of the rooms before the fire became so great and grouped the furniture together and threw tarps over them as you can see here which really saved a lot of damage to the furniture one of the first of the museum community to arrive was built more house and gardens and their staff and they sent it back out for sorry sent out for supplies and equipment including a truck to help move the furniture into the warehouse and as you can see they they kind of quickly took over they were very generous in their supplies and equipment we offered to repay them but they said in a way they there was a we did them a favor because they got to practice their disaster recovery plan at our expense but you can see fire trucks are still in the background and the police had cordoned off the area but you can see they're they're washing artifacts and beginning to triage and sort and set up different areas to figure out what to do with them we moved all the furniture out of the house by the end of the day and trucked over to the warehouse the carl sandberg national park service folks were there other state historic site staff were there to help out this these are papers that are trying in the visitor center the wolf memorial had about 600 sheet music that needed to be dried out everything was just wet thoroughly wet these are items getting ready to be packed more items to dry out one of the local community representatives or representatives from Ingalls grocery store came and offered to help and they ended up bringing a trailer because the tool chest the lawnmowers and that sort of equipment was stored in the basement of the boarding house and they didn't have any place to store the equipment so Ingalls provided a trailer for those items to be stored in they also supplied bread trays or bread racks the plastic racks that can be stacked those were wonderful for for drying out the paper items here's a group that's packing the each box was numbered and here's an example of a packing slip and see they just wrote wrote down a brief description of what the item was and the accession number if they could read it one thing to note is when you have your accession numbers written in black and they're covered with soot they're often quite difficult to read we also found that a lot of the numbers just popped off or burned off or slid off or anyway we had a dick into the time trying to match things up but fortunately we had the inventory that Julie and I had finished and we produced a print out so we slowly but surely were able to match things up the blue tarp that you see here the the contractors actually came in and rebuilt the lines of the roof so that the tarp would work more effectively and you can barely see it but there is a fence all around the property with a no trespassing sign um Steve did hire overnight security to keep people away and they made a few arrests from what I understand inside the house the this is from the attic looking down so you can see not only did the roof collapse both ceilings and most of the upstairs rooms collapsed collapsed as well um this is due of the north sleeping porch which was not on tour we were using it as a storage room unfortunately a lot of the furniture that you see in here Julie and I had quote rescued unquote from the basement during our inventory and we found these wonderful pieces of furniture so we moved them up here for safekeeping so we we were both devastated by that but life goes on this is the porch main porch after we restored it again most of this is original furnishings although the tech files we were um acquired later the burn thing that this is a suite of furniture known as cottage furniture that was originally in the woodland street home owned by the family and all of the wolf children were born in this bed at some point in the 1950s it was painted over with a light green latex paint um as you can see in the headboard there's this cartouche that was dark and then we could tell there was a flower there but we really couldn't tell much about it um this bed this is the bed shortly after the fire you can see the the roof caked in on it and actually one of the legs was burned rather badly and had to be replaced most of our furniture restoration or conservation was done by Gary Barnhart he was a former uh Biltmore health furniture conservator but he said I don't I don't do painting painted furniture and I don't do upholstered furniture so unfortunately the conservation lab at uh Biltmore helped us out and they determined that through paint analysis this was what the bed looked like and later a woman showed up and had pictures of a similar set and yes indeed it they did a fantastic job uh this is that cartouche cleaned up and you can see it's quite lovely here's the bed and the bureau on exhibit along with the wash fan so they they really did an absolutely fabulous job while Thomas Wolfe was in college at Carolina his beloved brother Ben contracted pneumonia at the age of 25 so to nursing back to health Julia moved him into the boarding house into this room and if you see the rocking chair to the right she supposedly spent many hours sitting in that chair or trying to nursing back to health but unfortunately he died um this is the ceiling that has caved in on everything surprisingly did very little damage to the furniture this is Julia's rocker um but this is the bed the room put back together and uh you can see Julia's chair there's a better shot of it uh Gary did a really good job of uh matching the the wood and recreating the arm that was missing and rocker in the kitchen the linoleum floor was actually reproduced it was silk screened shortly after the state took over we had a a piece of the original linoleum and surprisingly that was one of the toughest parts after the fire was trying to get that floor recreated um this is the kitchen after the fire and if you note in the left foreground there's a coal stove of which the Carl Sandberg National Park Service restored for us um and this is the kitchen today the the trying to get linoleum that matched the original floor or having it reproduced was just absolutely horrendously expensive we were looking at 30 to 40 thousand dollars so we ended up contracting with an exhibit farm to recreate a piece of it that we could put underneath that table and at least get the visitors a sense of of um what was there there were many treasures that we found this pie safe was in the kitchen and it was at some point painted with the brown latex paint all over it we had no idea how beautiful it was until there was um all the paint was cleaned off um this was a cupboard that sat in the hallway between the dining room and the kitchen the doors are slightly off center so the fire that came out from the kitchen the flames uh charred the top of that cupboard so that had to be replaced and then repainted the icebox which sat just to the left of the door was mostly protected from the flames and had very little damage except for smoke this was the front hall before um if you look behind the door right here there's a very dark secretary and this is a very dark pure mirror um this was the the front hall afterwards and if you notice how dark it is up here the flames are coming out of the two doors um into this area and note how light it is down here so when the fire department tells you to go low or crawl out of a fire this is a really good shot of how the what the difference is and why it's important to stay as low as you can the other interesting thing that we found out about the fire was sometimes when the flames are very intense it creates almost a tornadic effect and so um the the um we found several small loose items from the dining room in the front hall as well as even as far as the kitchen we found some teacups and and small pieces of cutlery um this was the secretary that was behind the door in the front hall and see how dark and dingy it was and actually we almost couldn't tell any difference because it was so dark before the fire and this is the after it's been cleaned up we were just absolutely astounded at the wood graining and in the front hall this is the mirror that uh you saw the side view of the top was nearly charged completely off so Gary did a fantastic job of recreating from pictures of the pieces that were there we didn't even know that there was all that inlay work this is a shot of a second floor bathroom after the fire and then after restoration the children's dining room after the fire the oftentimes the wolf children would come over to eat at the boarding house and uh they were not allowed to eat with the border so they they ate here in this dining room so this is afterward the 1937 bedroom is upstairs it got its name because in 1937 wolf came back to Asheville and by that time his popularity had increased to the point where he was just bothered so much he ended up going to work in a cabin outside of town but he did stay here in 1937 after the fire you can see where the ceiling had caved in and again we were really lucky that very little of the furniture was damaged that much but this is the room after the fire this bedroom is the room that's farthest away from the dining room and you can see just how black it was apparently the smoke was because the house was added to onto a couple of times this it was really difficult for the firefighters they actually chopped holes you can see the hole here that they to get to the hot spots in the house this is that same room afterwards this is the drunken hallway if you can if you see it tilt slightly from the right down to the left so when you walk down that hall you really do have to balance yourself because it's almost like walking through a fun house one of the interesting stories was one of the engineers told Steve that she thought she could fix that and Steve said please don't do that because the house was added onto and no telling what it would do to the rest of the house they came back from lunch one day and the plaster one of the plaster guys was in his office fuming because his plaster was cracking so when Steve went over he realized that um she was the engineer had indeed jack was starting to jack up the house so not only did he put it back the way it was but he threw her off the property but anyway that hallway still has that slanted floor floor way so it's a fun hallway to walk down this is the south sleeping porch it's also called tom sleeping porch because apparently whenever it was empty tom liked to sleep there and sort of use it as his bedroom one of the interesting stories is when julie and i were doing the inventory in that corner that you see we most of the just about every day we'd see this little tiny spider so we would sweep away his web and the next day he'd be there again so after the fire when we joined the walkthrough i'll be darned if that spider wasn't still there anyway this is the sleeping porch after the fire um there the two items on the left were uh disc and so we definitely could not get them clean although the one on the right did get a lot more clean than the one on the left the object on the right is uh was glazed but still the smoke had gotten into the crazing and there was just no way to to get it clean um this was a basin that was in that 1937 bedroom and unfortunately one of the beans hit the basin and knocked it over um so we were we managed to get most of the pieces but you can see there are small ones missing the cleanup crew did a fantastic job of putting aside everything that they thought was salvageable um and so they were finding lots of chips and pieces of things that that um we were able to match up with artifacts and put things back together there were some improvements again this is another piece of furniture that had darkened with time and we had no idea our beautiful wood graining underneath it this is the dining room today if you notice the fireplace on the right hand side i've got a better picture of it in a minute um steve decided that he wanted to put the dining room back as best he could but he also wanted to use period furniture but not accession that he wanted the visitors to be able to sit at these tables and get some sort of deal of of um what it was like to eat in the dining room and in fact we have done a couple of fundraisers with dinner in the dining room we've worked with the Renaissance hotel they they would bring the food over and we would do two seating seatings and clean up immediately afterwards both have been proven to be very very successful um here's a picture of the fireplace it's originally the wood was originally chestnut and local craftsman had enough chestnut that he was able to reproduce it the tiles did pretty well in the fire a couple of them were cracked but most everything was able to be put back so a new roof you can see the slate roof is is back on the boarding house and a new coat of paint we were actually doing paint analysis at the time of the fire and discovered that this was the color that uh wolf described in his book he thought it was a hideous color and i have to admit it it's kind of grown on me but it was a little jarring to go from white to a brilliant yellow like this um you you can go home again this is the the front of the house and this is steve hill just before he retired you can see he now has gray hair um and he's he's earned every single one of them but uh he did a fantastic job of of um getting what he wanted and the house looks great today so lessons learned be prepared at the time of the fire none of our sites had a disaster prepared in this plan we put together a boilerplate version and distributed it to all the sites and work with them so that they could tailor tailor it to their needs and specifications some of the things and the disaster plan include floor plans noting where the the locations of pool stations and fire extinguishers being a state agency we have lots of forms that we have to fill out so this is one from the state bureau of investigation and we also have departmental forms so each plan is just a truck full of information how to how to organize response your disaster response and teams and triage and so forth um training is very important these are actually images from the quote burn fill museum unquote that the north Carolina connecting to collections uh conducted a hands-on workshop uh we work with the burn fill fire department which is on the coast and they we went in and set up a museum of using fake objects these were collected artifacts and or objects not artifacts but books and papers and furniture and clothing and so forth and arranged them in cabinets and created a period setting and shelving and so forth so the fire department really appreciated it the night before they went in and and uh did their controls burn it gave them a greater appreciation of how to to react in a cultural setting um and then the next day we came in with the participants and they organized themselves into teams and set up triage areas and began treating the objects and packing them so forth so really really good training session um we have developed through the years a list of items that are very helpful in a disaster situation and every spring we send out that inventory to all of the sites and they note which artifacts I mean which items they have how many and so forth and then that information is compiled into a master checklist you see the front page here once that's compiled and it's sent out to all of the sites and the the manager so that they'll um so that if there is an emergency we'll know who has the closest materials that are needed we've also bought a trailer that we've put a lot of our disaster supplies in the we've stored at the center of our state and we've got the more sensitive items packed up on a shelf ready to go so we can have the trailer hitched up and move those sensitive items into the trailer and hit the road within about five or ten minutes um this is a form that we use that the sites can use to go through their facilities and check out various areas to see how well they're doing sometimes it's a reminder that gutters need to be cleaned out or bushes are growing too close to the building or housekeeping's not doing their job and so forth so it's just a real good checklist to to go through about once a year um one interesting thing that we noticed in the fire I mentioned that front bedroom our front room next to the dining room that the door was closed because the furniture in there was sustained very little damage that's part of their opening and closing procedures now the staff at the thomas wolf memorial go through and open up all the doors on the morning that are available to the public and then close the doors in the evening you want to try to minimize panic this is a flip chart that is available through the southeastern museums conference it's not a replacement for your disaster plan but it's just to help you through those initial few minutes of panic that can ensue when you you have something like an explosion or earthquake or a tornado or something you just go down to the say the page that says tornado and you flip to that flip it open to that section and it tells you who to call what to do and so forth so where to meet it's just a really good reminder to help people remain calm and it's also good if you've got volunteers that are not quite as familiar with your situation that they'll be able to use this and it will help them know what to do. This is one that's used by the North Carolina Transportation Museum and notice that they've got their street address because oftentimes when you call 911 they want to know what your address is and if you have volunteers they often don't know what the address is or the phone number. This is an example we have each phone at the Transportation Museum and hopefully most of our sites have this flip chart by their phone so that they'll be able to refer to it if needed. This is actually Marlene Menchew's desk if you note the blue flashlight she arranged to have these flashlights attached to the phone so if the lights go out and you can make it to the phone you can grab your flashlight and shake it up and down a few times and then that activates it. She did submit this idea to the historic preservation and for May Day idea and won a prize. The pocket response plan or prep was something that was devised by the Council of State Archivists or COFA. We tailored the template to specifications for historic sites. There was a lot of archival information that we didn't need so anyway we tailored it and sent it out to the sites and then they tailored it to their specific situations and we provided them with envelopes so that they could fold them up and keep them with them at all times. The other other two tools that are really good the field guide to emergency response that you can get that through heritage preservation as well as the salvage wheel. All of our sites have the salvage wheel and we have several copies of the field guide that periodically sites can look at the DVD and just review some specific situations but it's a really good tool to help you get organized if you don't have a disaster response. One other thing to consider is your insurance coverage. The as a state institution the Department of Insurance ensures a house and they wanted to put the house back together as cheaply as possible so they were insisting that we replace the slate roof with a asphalt roof and I was one of the battles that Steve won and also the plaster walls they wanted to replace with sheetrock so that was a tough road to hold and it actually put a fine schedule for a couple of years while we were fighting those value battles. Another thing to keep in mind is the fine arts insurance. Most of the items in the house were considered a total loss for example a chair that may have had a market value of $85 was going to cost $125 to have it conserved so in that case it's a total loss. The insurance company will pay you the $85 but they also have rights of salvage so if they pay for that chair they can take it from you. Fortunately in our case the insurance company was very much aware that the items in the house were original to the house so they decided to leave the salvage with us. Establishing networks is a good idea. Robert James who is the Executive Director of the North Carolina Preservation Consortium has worked very closely with Heritage Preservation and the North Carolina Connecting to Collection staff to create networks across the state. Macron is actually the mountain area cultural resources emergency network those were three counties in the Asheville area that the museum communities formed and they meet periodically to have workshops and training. They needed each other's institution so that they're very familiar with the institutions in case of another disaster they'll be able to step in and respond more quickly and effectively. So here in the triangle which is Raleigh Durham and Chapel Hill we have formed Tachron which is the Triangle Cultural Resources Emergency Network and there are similar organizations being formed in Charlotte the Triad which is Brainsboro, Winston-Salem and High Point and Wilmington on the coast. So I would like to remind you that when a disaster occurs that becomes a community event not only your museum colleagues but your constituents are going to respond and help you out. So if you're prepared it really does help reduce stress and we found that out Sharon Bennett who is an archivist with the College of Charleston and I periodically will do the hands-on disaster recovery workshops and we were in Little Rock, Arkansas a few years ago and within a couple of weeks we were contacted by one of the participants and she said that she had a small fire in her institution and she because of the workshop she kicked she didn't panic she knew exactly what to do she got everything organized she triaged she said it worked beautifully so like the Boy Scouts say be prepared. I've got my contact information here if you would like additional information on materials or tools that I showed you documents and so forth feel free to call me or if we run out of time and you have a question feel free to contact me. Great thank you so much Martha that's just I mean those pictures are incredible so we do have a number of questions and one of the biggest ones you've gotten recently is are some of those documents of your emergency plan available for viewing publicly so people can use it to model their own disaster plan. Sure yeah if you contact me I'll be more than happy to send email you a copy. Okay and then Jeff also pointed out there was a lot of interest in the flip chart and creating one for their own institutions and Jeff said at palmcopsc.org there's a fillable template for the flip chart and instructions on their blog and how to use that so and I'll also put that link up when we put up the recording of this webinar so let me go ahead and go back to some of the questions we got earlier on in the webinar Corey out in Seattle Washington he was curious after the fire who was allowed inside the building to retrieve objects for the volunteers and what was the process of handling that and did the fire department have to sign off with the facility manager involved with inspecting the building and signing off? Yes as soon as the fire was over and of course I'm getting all this second and third hand because I was not there but it's my understanding that once the fire department was sure that the fires were completely out they did allow Steve and Julie to walk through the house to do an initial assessment and then they came out and worked with the Biltmore staff to create the triage areas. I'm not exactly sure how soon the cleanup crew got there and I can't remember the name of the firm but Steve contacted them and they were there within hours to begin the initial cleanup and then while they were cleaning up other volunteers were going in a certain number of volunteers were allowed to go into the house and begin bringing the artifacts out and then take them around to the back of the house to lay them out for the triage areas. Okay I hope that answers your question Corey we have another question from Lynn in North Carolina she was curious if there was any damage to the stained glass windows? Yes there were several windows around the front of the house besides in the front that had stained glass but some of the stained glass was broken however most of the stained glass did make it through the fire. Okay and then Celeste in Hawaii had the question she's curious if your fire department had floor plans of your building prior to the fire she's just curious how do they know to group and cover your furniture and save them from water everyone has kind of pointed out how amazing that relationship with the first responders was and saving artifacts. Yeah not only is Steve Hill an Asheville native he knew most of the rally from the Asheville firefighters and so they were they most of them grew up in Asheville and had visited the house so they were familiar with the house and knew exactly what to do as a matter of fact the fire chief later told Steve that if it had been any other house in Asheville with similar damage they would have just let it burn because the fire was so great when they got there but they they all knew how important the house was not only to the community but to the nation and the literary world and so they they really did everything they could to save the house that it's a good idea to let the firemen become familiar with your organization. I know when Sharon Bennett was at the Charleston Museum they would invite firefighters or the chiefs to their openings whenever they had a new exhibit they wanted the firefighters to become familiar with the floor plans especially if they changed the floor plans with various exhibits so the it's really good to have a good working relationship with your local fire department. Definitely and in a few of the courses many of you may have taken some of them earlier this year on creating a disaster response plan with Julie Page and also a risk evaluation course with Alex Alart and we also talk about that as well of creating these these strong bonds with first responders and as Martha shows it it's kind of it saved a lot of artifacts. So let's have a follow-up question for you Martha. She's curious you know this was a long road to recovery and she's curious on where someone the funding came from to do these recovery activities. Well we of course quickly exhausted our insurance funding which only covered about half of what we needed or maybe three fourths. The public was amazing in their donation State Hill spoke to several groups I can't think of the writer's name but a writer came and did several fundraisers for the the fight because of the publicity all across the nation people would just send money. I remember one time when I was there Steve came out of his office holding a check and he had just gotten a check for five thousand dollars from somebody in California so it was mostly the public that stepped up and made donations along with several fundraisers. Wow and we also just had Dan the way in in Ohio we have our emergency response view he works for the fire division in Upper Arlington Ohio and he's saying it's often common practice for firefighters to group furniture and other large objects into one spot opening up space so good to know. We have actually before I get to the next question let me go ahead and pull over a survey we have a little over five minutes left so let me pull this out so this is just a quick evaluation on the webinar we love your feedback and we also love ideas if you have ideas on future webinars that we can do or potential speakers you love to hear about that. We have a question from Marcia in Northern California California she's curious if you would recommend emotional triage as part of a disaster response plan. I think it's something to certainly be aware of Julie joked that she was a zombie for the first few hours but I don't think that was the case it was once you people respond differently to disasters there are some people who they can't comprehend what's going on and so the best thing to do is just find them a job and and set them over to the side there's some people who run around like chickens with their head cut off so you know I think you just have to figure out how a person is responding and find a job for them to do that's appropriate for their emotional response. I know for weeks and months afterwards we couldn't look at film footage that a local TV station had shot without just breaking down and crying it was very emotional to to go through that process. The day of I think it helped to have folks from Biltmore there because as various wolf staff would start to go to pieces they were a little more removed from it and they could they could commiserate with them or just say okay I understand but I really need to know the answer to this question so that would you know having somebody who can calm you down and help with the decision making process is good. And did that experience inform what you did next when you started creating these disaster response plans? How did you incorporate that into these these planning documents? We actually have not done it as well as I would like. We next year have some plans to revisit all of our disaster plans because I think we need to do a better job of responding. We did have another fired another one of our sites and I think it's a good idea when you experience a disaster to go back to your plan and review it and see what works and what doesn't work and update the plan accordingly. Okay and then I just kind of have a question it sounds like initially after the fire you had an outpouring of help in the community how did you organize all these people you know how did you assign them jobs how did you you know that's a lot of people to deal with after a really devastating event how did you guys go about organizing that help? Well that's where the the wolf staff they kept track of of the volunteers that's one of the reasons why Steve put a fence around the house because there were so many people who wanted to help and so they took names and telephone numbers and not sure if they called anybody or not because after all of the artifacts were out of the house and in a warehouse then it was really up to the collection staff to go through and and figure out what conservation needs were and so forth. We were making notes on the printout talking with conservators to figure out how much it was going to cost for each of the artifacts and then we were able to turn over that information to the insurance company and we actually settled with the insurance company as far as the artifacts within about three and a half months which was pretty good considering the number of artifacts and the amount of damage but for the most part I think the best thing to do is if you have too many volunteers they can get in the way so take their name and telephone number and just politely let them know that you'll call when they're needed and it's also good because you can contact them later and ask if they could help out with donations as well. I think several volunteers or I think the Wolf House ended up getting several volunteers from the the help that was offered. Oh fantastic and great advice too. I just I have one more question and if the audience members have any more questions feel free to type them in. I would love you to speak a little bit about your experiences dealing with the media. I imagine there was a swarm and of course there's always a concern of saying too much or too little. Can you speak a little bit about your experience when you guys were approached by the media on this particular topic? Yes one person was designated to be the media spokesperson and everybody was told if they got a question from the media they were referred to refer the media to that person. Again I wasn't there that day but I understand that sometimes the media could be a little bit persistent so you just have to be polite or firm and say I'm sorry I'm not able to answer your question. I've got work that I need to do please go see so-and-so and and he or she will be able to answer your question. One of the things to keep in mind is that your media spokesman is not always your director. Again you have to look at who is the person who can remain the calmest and not react and try to give out factual information instead of rumors and hearsay. And Adrienne points out too when they had a disaster at their institution that the media did pull a lot of time from saving artifacts so really great advice. Martha thank you so much for sharing with us we'll go ahead and close up now a recording of this webinar will be available on the webinar archive and I'll try to post all these great links that you guys have shared in the Q&A so those will also be available and then Martha has kindly given her email address so if you have questions for her feel free to send them her way. And of course you guys can always continue this conversation in our discussion board. Our next webinar we're taking August off for the summer and our next webinar I'm really excited about will be Thursday September 26th at 1 p.m. Eastern and we are focusing on the care of leather which has come up in the discussion board recently so make sure to join us for that. Thank you Martha so much for your time and thank you to all our participants for logging in today have a great afternoon.