 Hello, everyone, and welcome. I'm Elsa Huxley from Heritage Preservation, and we're so glad you're joining us for this live event on how cultural institutions can work with emergency response. Heritage Preservation is moderating the Connections Online Community in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The site is designed and produced by Learning Times. The goal of the online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. In developing the community, we have drawn on many resources that were developed for the Connecting to Collections Initiative, including the Connecting to Collections Bookshelf and the Raising the Bar workshops and webinars. And links to these resources are filed under the topics menu on our site. We will also file a recording of today's webinar there, as Mike just said. So today, we will be discussing working with emergency responders about twice a month the online community features a particularly helpful preservation resource and hosts a webinar like this related to it. The resource we posted for today can be found on the home page at ConnectingToCollections.org. And we have a screenshot of the poster. This is a PDF that you can download, and we'll be posting links to it later if you didn't have a chance to download it before we started today. Today, we want to welcome Laurie Foley, who is Vice President of Emergency Programs here at Heritage Preservation, and Dan Kokensbarger, who is the Public Information Officer for the Upper Arlington Ohio Fire Division. Laurie coordinates national programs on cultural heritage and disaster management, including the Alliance for Response Initiative. She is also Director of the Heritage Emergency National Task Force, and is a member of the state-level Massachusetts Emergency Management Team. She's a member of the Massachusetts Cooperative Disaster Network, the Co-Chair of the Emergency Committee of AIC, and she's a member of the AIC Collections Emergency Response Team. Dan has been a firefighter for 29 years. His duties include curation and collections management of an in-house fire museum, and he is a member of Ohio Task Force One, one of the 28 urban search and rescue teams working under the auspices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He deployed to the World Trade Center Collapse and worked with fellow rescuers for 10 days at Ground Zero. So Laurie and Dan, thanks for joining us today and for helping us out with questions about how cultural institutions can work with emergency responders. To start us off, we had some poll questions. Here's the first one. Which of the following best describes where you work or volunteer? OK, a lot of people from non-profit cultural institutions and state institutions or agencies. Thanks for that, and we have another question for you today, which is, we'd like to know how well you know your emergency responders. Thank you very much for those. And now, Laurie, I'll pull over your presentation and we can begin. Great. Dan and I are doing a tag team approach, and we will do a brief presentation. And then we hope that will foster a lot of questions from you. So Dan, go ahead and launch off. OK, hello, everyone. We wanted to start out after the poll by talking about who emergency responders are. And one thing that we often talk about in my field is the fact that no matter how big or how small a disaster is, every one of them is local. And so for most of you and your institutions, your primary contacts are going to be your local fire EMS and law enforcement agencies. You may also, depending on your municipality or where you live, have some building inspectors and utility personnel who can aid you when you have disasters or things like fires and floods and things like that. And you might not think of those so much because you don't always consider them as emergency personnel. Not so obvious where you could seek out some help would include your health departments, especially if you have an institution where you offer food services because, at least in Ohio, and in my county, you have to have the health department clear you after you've had a fire or some kind of a situation like that before you're allowed to re-offer or reopen your food service. And then the American Red Cross is a great place. We use them all the time for assistance with post-fire recovery. Now, most of your interaction with the three levels of emergency management you see on the slide there, which are local, state, and federal, are going to occur if you experience one of the bigger disasters like hurricanes or tornadoes or floods. And those will probably lean more toward the recovery and rebuilding phases as opposed to that immediate emergency response like what my fire department would do. And then finally, there are some instances where your military services, especially the National Guard, we're seeing them more and more expand their missions to include things like search and rescue and debris removal and those kind of things. So those are just kind of a quick overview of who you might reach out to. And as far as how do I get a hold of those folks, why almost all those agencies these days are most easily contacted via information that's on their websites, or you can always fall back to the blue pages of the phone book. Lori? I'm so resigned about that. That is possible. Our cultural heritage institutions are visited 2 and 1 half billion times a year, and more than 30,000 cultural heritage institutions are stewards of nearly 5 billion artifacts. The Heritage Health Index was a project of heritage preservation in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The report on the State of America's collections was published in 2005. And this statistic is one of the most alarming findings of the survey. A shockingly high percentage of cultural heritage institutions do not have a plan and are at risk. How does your institution measure up? Here you see how the 80% was derived with historical societies having even more institutions without an emergency plan and without trained staff and independent research libraries with a greater percentage better prepared. Well, as you can see on the slide, we have a not so fortunate picture. I mean, there are firefighters there, obviously, and there's someone's valuable collection that is an effort being made to work toward salvage as best as possible. And that's where I come in. That's where we come in from the emergency services side. And that's really a big part of what we're trying to get across to you in this webinar, is to take advantage of us in your locality and to start ahead of time to get those things set up. And what we hope to get across to you today is what some of our standard procedures are. So you have an idea of what we are trying to do in a daily basis when we, unfortunately, have to come and aid you. Their collections, obviously, every one of yours, whether it's in an institution or even in your own home, are very vulnerable, very valuable. Sometimes they're irreplaceable. And that's why doing some kind of planning ahead of time for, again, the big disaster or the small one is absolutely critical. And we would like you to look at collaborating with your local first responders when you're doing that planning part also. Here's one part where your local emergency management agency can help, because they usually have staff members who specialize in the planning part. And the planning can be sometimes the hardest part is trying to get everything down and think of all those little things that you'll need to do when something bad does happen and that you hope you'll never have to institute. You might also do something we do in the fire service, which is check with other in your case museums or institutions that have collections. See if they'll allow you to use their plans as a starting point instead of reinventing the wheel. And I would use this when you're doing that if you don't know those people already, or even if you do as a kind of a foot in the door to establish what we call MOUs, which stands for Memorandums of Understanding, which is just a little agreement between you two that you would help each other during a disaster situation. We do mutual aid on a regular basis. Every single day on normal runs and on big runs, we have our closest departments help us out, and we help them out. And we don't look at it from a standpoint of, well, we're crossing that municipality line or anything. We just look at it as somebody out there that's a fellow citizen's in help and we want to be able to help them. And so we do that mutual aid all the time. And you can certainly take advantage of that in your own fields by having yourself available to help others that are in museums or institutions that have collections and then a reciprocity setup also. When you're doing your plans, one big thing we like to see you do is use action statements and not a lot of philosophy. That's what makes those plans so fat a lot of times, sitting up on those shelves and sometimes collecting dust because they're never opened. It's just so overwhelming. And if you use action statements, it helps because you're not going to use this often, which is good. And having these task worksheets to tell people what they need to do can really help you bring some order to the chaos when you have these situations come up. They'll relax people. They give them something that gets them busy and then once they get into a mode of, hey, I just have to do what it says here, it really, really gets you through to that next thing that needs to happen. And of course, exercise the plan. Don't just plan it, write it out and then just sit there with it. We do drills all the time with each other and within our own department. We have hiccups every time we do the drills. So you can imagine what it would look like in real life if you never, ever practice these drills. When you're doing the drills, I always suggest to people that you start with simple tabletops and then move on to functional later. The difference between those two is the tabletop, just like it says, you sit around in a meeting area of some kind and someone throws problems at you and you figure out how you're gonna handle those problems, what you would do, who you would call or whatever. And then later on, you can take those baby steps and move on up to where you physically do that thing that's in your plan. And then finally, for this slide, I would say ask first responders to help you with oversight and critique of those drills. We're not in your field necessarily, but we know how to work together and how people need to collaborate when it comes to emergency situations. Lori? Great, thanks, Dan. One of the things that Dan brought up was the training component. And it's not such a bad idea to partner with cultural heritage institutions in your community. By training together, if there is something that happens to, say, your institution, another partner institution in your community can come to your aid. And while you are overwhelmed in trying to figure out your next steps and put together a recovery plan, they can be there helping you, providing assistance, and they have the training already. This kind of mutual aid, as Dan was talking about, can show emergency responders that the cultural institutions in your community are able to work together and can come up with a solution and aren't necessarily a part of the problem. So let's take a couple more minutes, seconds, I guess it happens, to do a few more polls. So let's pull over the first question. Does your agency or cultural institution have a disaster plan for people? And it looks like the vast majority of institutions do, which is stupendous. And the fact that nobody answering don't know is even a better indication. All right, let's move on to the next question. Does your agency or cultural institution have a disaster plan for collections? And again, it looks like the larger number of participants have disaster plans for their collections, which is sometime in the future. That's this question again, I'd love to see that come to 100%. The next question, let's take a look at that. Would you like the one about the plan being updated or let's do the people plan. All right, for the people disaster plan, emergency plan, if you answered yes, you have a disaster plan that includes people that is targeted for people. Has the plan been updated within the last year? And we're seeing that most of the plans have not been updated. The most important thing in an emergency, obviously, is life safety. And so it's really incumbent upon institutions to keep an updated list of staff contact information to know where they are, how you can reach them, whether it's reaching them at home, whether it's reaching them at their office, whether it's reaching them with a mobile phone. So this is a little thing that will go a very long way in getting information conveyed and communicated and making sure that you are in touch with everyone on your staff. All right, let's look at the collection plan follow up question. If you answered yes, you do have a collection plan. Has the plan been updated within the last year? Okay, it looks like in most cases the plan has not been updated within the last year. And I'm glad that some people are honest saying they don't know whether it's been updated within the last year. Whatever happens here stays in the virtual world. You don't have to worry about anyone saying anything. It is important to have a collection plan. And as Dan and I will mention over and over again, it can be a helpful activity and it's not as painful as you might think it will be. So let's table the plans now and go back and give you some ideas about what you might be able to do by working with emergency responders. So the emergency responders need to know about your facility. They need to know about floor plans. They need to know about changes to floor plans that are due to exhibits that are temporary as well as to changes to floor plans that are a result of renovation. They need to know the location of utility shutoffs. Where is the water shutoff? When you have water coming down, do you know how to turn those off? The location of priority objects is also something that would be very important to know. Let me give you a brief example of what happens and how beneficial it is knowing your emergency responders. The Ropes Mansion was built in Salem, Massachusetts in 1727. It's owned by the Peabody Essex Museum and is on the National Register of Historic Places. The furnishings are original to the house, which is rare. On a summer Sunday in 2010, and you can see that it was a sunny summer Sunday, a two-alarm fire broke out. Fortunately, the staff had a plan and had met with local responders prior to any kind of disaster befalling them. The firefighters knew exactly what to do to protect the treasures and the museum had a disaster response team which helped evacuate the artifacts. There was some damage to the building, but everything of value was salvaged. The museum director described it as miraculous and the firefighters described it as just doing our job. And Dan has other examples as well. The slide that you just saw pop up is very pertinent to use as an example for today because this fire happened in my city just a couple of weeks ago and you're looking at the inside of one of the rooms and you can see the real dimension of what happens when you undergo a fire, unfortunately. A couple of things I'll point out in there. You'll notice that there are some unburned timbers toward the top and yet there's still a lot of damage there. You'll find that in a lot of instances we have to do more damage in order to save the overall structure. And one of the things we have to do always is to make sure we do what we call overhaul which is to make sure the fire hasn't extended beyond a certain point. You'll also notice we use the good old blue tarps like you see on roofs everywhere whenever there are problems with hurricanes and tornadoes and things like that. We switched to those a few years ago because they're cheap and they're easy for us to throw over people's valuables. And so again, just an idea of the devastation that can happen. So you can imagine how much damage you can get into your collection jar and everything. So doing a real life example of this and how we work to help with salvaging I think is real important and obviously not happy that this event happened in our town because somebody has had to go through some suffering with this. But on the other hand it does bring it home I think a little more by being able to show you this. Can we go to the next slide? Here you'll see a view of what our firefighters did in moving materials over to the garage area. This was a very large structure, about 9,000 square feet in the southern part of our town. And it afforded us the ability to use other parts of it that were undamaged by moving those materials there. Now one of the things that was really difficult about this fire as far as salvage was that there were a lot of collectibles there. And even though it isn't a museum, it isn't a cultural institution, it does have materials that are very dear to those folks that were living there. And so us being able to move a lot of those out of the fire areas and out of the area where the water or damage was and everything and have them put over into another part of their house was very, very helpful to them obviously. And even with that you can see some of the charring and some of the ash and everything that got on the materials that were there. Lori talked a little bit about what our priorities are. And unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, the fire itself is going to cause problems from the flame and the smoke, obviously. And you're going to have problems from firefighting efforts. Putting water on something isn't the greatest thing in the world to do for collections, obviously. And the physical destruction, as I mentioned in the slide before, that we sometimes have to do in order to get to the seat of the fire. So we're not trying to hurt things purposefully, but we do have to do some demolition-type things and, again, putting that water on there in order to get the fire itself out. Our priorities at fires are always rescue first, extinguishment second, and property conservation third. We like to be doing all those at the same time. Simultaneous working on those three things is fantastic, but at this particular fire we had some trouble with access. We were trying to get into the attic, which is where the fire occurred. And that prolonged the amount of water we had to put on and it delayed our ability to do property conservation. Again, as I showed you there, we relocated much of the owner's possessions to that uninvolved garage. And if we could go to the next slide, you'll see that in some instances we can't move things around. That piano would have been very, very difficult. And so we threw salvage covers over the top of that, covered it in place. And sometimes we'll actually be throwing those covers as we're moving through the structure, trying to get to the fire itself. So we do a quick and dirty job right away. And then we try to later on, when the fire is under control, get those things either moved or get them covered in place. I might mention to you that at Mount Vernon, I know it is normal procedure for the collections folks there to precut and, in some cases, cover their objects that are in storage ahead of time because they have a sprinkler system there that will put out their fire should they have any. But that's obviously going to cause some water damage too. And so they're using culturally sensitive materials like polyethylene or polypropylene. It won't cause any problems. And they have those things covered up or are ready to cover those up with precut materials. And the last thing about this fire I'd like to say is that at this particular incident, and something that I'm presuming is happening across the country, and you have to be really careful about is we call them trolling disaster restoration companies. We are starting to see folks before the fire is even under control a lot of times with their trucks that say disaster and fire and water restoration. And they've got their business cards in hand. And they're waiting to accost the building owner with their services and give them the hard sell and everything. And you're in a very vulnerable position at that point. And we do our best to try to isolate you from them. I remember whispering in the ear of the owner while this fire was still going on, hey, be careful there's some folks over there behind there that are going to try to solicit business from you. My best advice is to have this worked out ahead of time with your insurance carrier so you don't even have to worry about having that kind of a confrontation as an emergency scene. Haven't noticed that's the last thing you need to deal with at that time. If we could go to the next slide. So a lot of what we're talking about today is relationships and building those with first responders. Obviously everyone's going to have a different personality. Different departments are going to have their own personalities as to how much and how aggressive they are with customer service. One thing that you might mention to people, or keep in mind I should say, is everyone's being forced to do more with less. And so you may not have some of those emergency agencies being as enthusiastic about your request as you'd like. One tack you might take is to explain to them that salvaging collections is really just an extension of the salvage efforts that we make as a basic service at every fire and emergency, like I showed you in those slides of our fire. And that really it's family's personal collections that are being protected at most of those homes. And those should be as important as the collections that are in institutions and public places. You should have those kind of on the same level. You also might mention to them that you are offering to assist them in their pre-planning efforts. Pre-planning is a term that we use in the fire service for any ability we can to find out things ahead of time. Laurie mentioned where the utility shutoffs are, what your priorities are as far as salvaging materials. If we have to make some choices, what would you want to be taking care of first? Where are your emergency exits? Where are your sprinkler shutoffs? All kinds of things like that. If you use that term pre-planning, that might help you get in the door. You could talk about having a facilities walk-through at your place for each of the shifts. Most places are on a 24-48 shift, one day on and two days off, which means you'd have to do it three different times. And what the responders will be noting as they would go through. You might, as a last little hint, do some bartering, like maybe offering to help with displays that they have at their fire stations and at their city buildings or with their historical collections. Everyone's trying to do a lot of different things and you have that special expertise and you may be able to offer that in exchange and that might, again, open the door for you also. So build those relationships, get a hold of those folks, and let them help you out. Lori? I'd like to add a couple more things. As Dan said, you don't want to come across as being a gimme, gimme, gimme institution. You can change that attitude and possibly crack getting access to your emergency responders by letting them know what you can offer to them. So you might want to start simply by providing your emergency plan to your local emergency responders to have them keep it on file. It requires no effort on their part, and yet it provides a lot of information for them when they might have to come to your institution. As Dan mentioned, a walkthrough would be possibly a next step where you're inviting them in and they have a very critical eye and can help tell you things that you can do to improve the safety at your institution. And then maybe the next level up you might want to invite them to do a site assessment, to work with you to help determine what the risks are, what the hazards are at your institution, as well as how you might mitigate some of those hazards that are there. So invite your emergency responders to come to your institution. You can invite them to conduct training activities at your facility. Hazmat incident response, even an active shooter response, emergency responders are always looking for venues to practice their training. And this is a wonderful way for them to understand what it is in your facility that's important to protect and how they would work in any kind of situation. You could also host community disaster preparedness workshops, whether it's for your local emergency management agency or an institution like the American Red Cross. So I want to speak very briefly about a national program with goals of bringing together the cultural heritage and emergency professionals before disaster strikes. And that's the Alliance for Response. Thanks to funding from the Fidelity Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Heritage Preservation has held forums in 18 regions across the country since 2003. And the results have been pretty stunning. There have been disaster networks. There's training both for the emergency management community as well as the cultural heritage community about each other's communities. And there have been real changes in policy at the institutional level, at the state level in terms of new annexes to emergency plans, as well as changes certainly in awareness at the federal level. These networks are really important for raising the profile of cultural heritage in the world of emergency response. So if your city or state is shown here and you weren't invited to an Alliance for Response forum, I encourage you to connect with that network. And with that, I think we will open it up for questions. Elsa, it looks like we have one up there from Anita. I can go ahead and try to answer that somewhat. Is there a standard procedure most cities would follow, or is each city different? As far as fire and EMS and emergency services, those in law enforcement, most places I think you're going to see follow a fairly standard procedure. I mentioned to you those priorities of rescue firefighting and salvage and property conservation. And almost everyone will use those as their priorities regardless of where you live. Now, where you're going to see some differences is in things like I mentioned earlier about the health departments. I know in our county, there are some folks that are covered by their local health department that is part of their city. Our town is actually small enough. We have about 34,000 people that we contract with our county health department for those kind of things. And so they are the primary one that we would go to if we needed some assistance on that end. The Red Cross, of course, being a national organization and a few other federal emergency management agency, and those are going to be pretty much the same. But your local EMAs may be somewhat different also, your local emergency management agencies. Again, just to give you an example, in Ohio, there are some EMAs that are staffed by one person. I mean, that is that they do everything. They answer the phones. They take the notes. It's usually a director. And sometimes it may even be someone that these are a volunteer or a part-paid or something like that. Same thing's going to happen also with your fire departments. If you have volunteer departments, you might have a paid chief or a part-paid chief where everyone might be volunteer. And so there you're meeting with your local citizens and local residents who do this on the side. And it's going to be a little different, obviously, working with them. You're going to have to tap their expertise, but you're going to have to work around their schedules because they're doing this on the side and they have another job that puts the food on the table. So again, some of those things are going to be different. But a lot of those maxims, as far as actual operations and those kind of things, add an emergency scene, are probably going to be pretty similar. Dan, why don't you share your knowledge of the incident command system with us? Sure. There, and Lori, I don't know if we have it coming up anywhere, the book that was written. I know that it's on your site and everything, but I had a chance to look at a little bit of that and all. The incident command system, and they talk about this in the book that's meant for cultural institutions, is a system that was set up from chaos, is really what it comes down to. We, even though we're supposed to be on the same page as far as what we do and everything, don't always, or didn't always work in that direction. And the incident command system really came about from the wildfires. And unfortunately, you're seeing those in Texas and some other places today. But the wildfires out west, especially in California, those things are what we call campaign events. And we say campaign, meaning this isn't your little backyard fire type thing. This is something that is involving departments throughout the state in California a lot of times and throughout the country sometimes. When you see smoke jumpers on television on the news and everything like that, and you see people on those fire lines and all, pretty big deal. And in fact, the National Interagency Fire Center that sometimes commands these fires out in California is in the Midwest in Boise, Idaho. So you see that, OK, I've got a guy here who's in charge, and he's not even in the same state, let alone close to the fire. Well, that system is meant to be able to handle that. And it's a scalable system that can be anything from, in my world, a car fire where there's just one truck on the scene up to that disaster where a tornado came in and took down an entire neighborhood to that giant disaster like your wildfires and those kind of things. And what they tried to do was to get a system set up where everyone could understand how to organize these chaotic scenes. And also, so there was commonality in terminology. I was telling Lori yesterday when we were preparing that, when I teach, a lot of times I use the example of the term tanker. If you are in Ohio and you are at a scene and let's say one of you was the incident commander and you requested to your dispatcher that you needed some tankers on the scene, you are going to get a number of vehicles, ground vehicles that have a lot of water in the back. That's just common terminology there. However, if you were out in California and you were at the same scene and you asked for tankers, you're going to get airplanes flying overhead. They're going to be dropping water on you. Two different locales, same term, two different meanings. And so the incident command system brings commonality to all those things and allows us to be able to help each other without wondering what exactly is they were looking for here. And it does everything from setting up the person in charge to breaking it down to manageable units and without getting into lots and lots of detail of it. We usually like to have a span of control where there's a one supervisor for at a maximum of five to seven people or five to seven fire engines and that kind of thing. And you can do the same thing in your own institution. I mean, somebody's going to be in charge there when you have an emergency of some kind. If you're a single, you just have one person in your place then that's going to be you most of the time because it's your place that we're coming to help. If you have those mutual aid folks coming in from other museums, you're going to be in charge and want to have tasks for them that you need to do. And so by using that incident command system, it makes it easy to work with us because we're used to that and it also gives you, as I said, some order to your chaos because these scenes are always going to be chaotic for you. Great. We have a question from Laura Wall in Delaware asking about the best source for training on the use of fire extinguishers. Okay. Laura? Is the local fire department best or is it seen to be spent at questions at the time? We have requests for that every once in a while. Again, I have to use my own local example. Most of the time when people ask for that, there's usually some kind of requirement with it. I know that we will teach school teachers, our nursing homes, they have some kind of requirement. They have to do that. And you can really go all over the board on that. You can do everything from simply a lecture type thing to an actual hands-on. Your local fire department, again, if they have the resources, most of the time, their fire prevention people do that kind of thing and will teach you about how to use those properly. They might even have a public education unit that just does training that includes fire extinguishers. It might be the folks that teach CPR and first aid and other things to the public. So we do see it as part of our mission to assist the public with things like this. I will caution you on a couple things. Usually, the departments will require you to pay for the extinguishers being used. Either they will require you to use the ones you have there and then you have to get them recharged and refilled with powder. Or they will require you, if you don't have enough, to rent them from a local company that deals with fire suppression. Folks can usually be found online or in the phone book. And they're the ones that, again, have the abilities to refill and recharge those and inspect them properly. If any of you have extinguishers that are required in your institutions, you may have had to deal with them in the past. So you've got that going on also. I would, the second part of my caution is that we always teach people that with fire extinguisher use, we really are primarily wanting you to get all your personnel that work there and any of your customers out of the place first. That is our absolute priority. The best situation would be that you have everybody evacuating, they know there's a situation because the alarm has gone off and they're getting out of the building safely and at the same time, you have someone that can be trying to put the fire out. We really don't want people wasting time trying to put the fire out without letting people know that something's going on. This fire can build really, really quickly and you really do make it worse. I mean, I would much rather see you get everybody out of there so that all the people are safe, maybe lose a little more of your material, but have emergency help on the way as quick as you can. Great. I think we'll go next from the local disaster to the much grander scene. And here you see a graphic of Hurricane Irene when it was a Category 3 hurricane back on August 24. And I just wanted to share with you some of the things that Heritage Preservation's Local Alliance for Response Networks were doing, actively preparing for the storm. Pre- and post-storm conference calls were joined by the New York City Alliance Network. These conference calls were offered by the Office of Emergency Management in New York City. And because the New York City Alliance Network has a seat at the table with the Office of Emergency Management, they are keenly aware of what is happening in preparation as well as what kind of activities are happening after an event, as well as helping provide information to the Office of Emergency Management if anything extends and becomes more difficult to deal with. And out goes of the Vermont Alliance for Response Forum is a group called Vermont's Cultural Heritage and Art Recovery Team, or VCHART. So VCHART, as a result of Hurricane Irene, is now acting as an information gathering and sharing resource. They're working with a number of Vermont agencies and organizations coordinating damage assessment and providing salvage advice to affected cultural institutions. This would not be possible if they hadn't been collaborating, if they hadn't made connections, if they hadn't made that first phone call to try to set up an initial meeting to get together. So these agencies and organizations include the Preservation Trust of Vermont, the Division of Historic Preservation, the State Archives and Public Records, the Vermont Historical Society, the Department of Libraries, Vermont Emergency Management, and even the American Institute for Conservation's Cultural Emergency Response Team. So this kind of collaboration demonstrates just how valuable and effective relationships can be. And I'd love Dan to share some information about his perspective of Irene. I told Lori that our task force, as was mentioned when Elsa was reading about my bio, was one of those that was sent to Irene. And just for a really quick background on what that is all about, Federal Emergency Management Agency has 28 task forces throughout the United States that are geared up for what we call urban search and rescue. And those were put together back when we were sending assistance through the Office of Foreign Disasters Assistance to Soviet Armenia and some of those other places that were having collapses of buildings from earthquakes and other major, mostly weather-related events so that there was an ability if something like that should happen in the United States to respond. Because that's a lot of times out of the area of possibility of local responders to handle. So we don't go very often. But when the big things do happen, you'll often see rescuers that are there working on those. She mentioned that I had deployed to Ground Zero. 10 years ago, Ohio was sent to New York. We had a number of task forces that were sent there because it was a giant building collapse or two building collapses. And there were also folks that were sent to the Pentagon and worked there. Previous to that, the Oklahoma City Bombing that most of you are probably familiar with. Teams were sent in there to try to find people. And what we've seen happen in the last few years is that they've expanded our mission beyond that heavy building collapse to also include wide area searches and assisting with those kind of things. And this is where these hurricanes come in. We have been to Katrina. We've been to Irene now. Quite a few of the hurricanes that have devastated, especially the southern part of the United States. And those task forces are made up of folks that are primarily from fire departments but also from other agencies like hospitals. Search dogs usually come from folks that either train dogs for other people or just have an interest in having an animal that can go on search and rescue missions. And the shot that you're seeing up on your screen is from our folks when they were traveling to New York State. Just that huge wall cloud up there of the hurricane kind of coming in. And it was just really stupendous to see that and overwhelming to know what Mother Nature could do. If you could go to the next slide also. You see our team here on the ground, the ones in the blue helmets. And not a lot of devastation you can see there but that road was covered not long before this shot was taken. And you can see some of the locals that are there that they went to help out. We were actually moved around quite a bit until they decided where things were gonna happen. As most of you know with these hurricanes, predicting them is like predicting the daily weather. It's very, very difficult to figure out where landfall is gonna occur, where most of the damage is gonna occur. Our particular situation was that there was an area just west of Albany in New York, which is the state capital, where there were four small villages, about 1500 people a piece that had had so many 911 calls during the hurricane's aftermath that they were unable to answer all of them. So they did not have all of them documented as having been accounted for. And they asked us or I should say deployed us on a mission to send our people in. And in a couple of cases, they had to go by helicopter because the cities were just cut off and search those areas to make sure that those folks were accounted for. Now, obviously a lot of homes and that kind of thing get taken care of in that particular situation. And when it comes to search and rescue, I mean that doesn't really fit a lot into what we're talking about here, at least as far as those task forces are concerned and helping you on a day-to-day basis like we've talked about with your collections and those kind of things. But if you are in an area that is often hurt by weather and struck by weather and remember that these hurricanes often will spawn tornadoes also, I mean you could lose a lot of your collections and you may have some kind of interaction with these folks for that kind of thing. Just know that when they come in and do that part, it's primarily to make sure that folks are okay and people are okay and eventually we're gonna get around to being able to help with some of those other things. But I was telling Lori when we were talking the other day that sometimes you just are going to lose the battle despite the amount of help that you have there. And unfortunately in these weather type events, they can really overwhelm local resources pretty quickly. Great, I think we can all take a page from the Emergency Responders Handbook and learn how we can collaborate best. Certainly within our institution but then gradually widening that circle within institutions, between institutions, within our community and then working larger and larger at the state and that's something that Heritage Preservation is trying to foster. In our last few minutes, I'd like to just offer some free tools and resources that are available that will really help and your community. The first one is one that perhaps most of you have heard of, May Day. It's an annual event that encourages cultural heritage institutions to undertake one simple preparedness activity each May. And so these activities can include fire extinguisher training, a fire drill, updating staff contact information in an emergency plan, inviting emergency responders for a walk-through to conduct or create a tabletop exercise. Earlier in the program, Dan had referred to a book on ICS. The book you see featured on the right, Implementing the Incident Command System at the Institutional Level, is really a wonderful way to learn about the Incident Command System and how it can be used at your institution. As Dan had mentioned before, when disaster strikes, and it's big enough that you have to evacuate your building, you no longer own that building. It belongs to the emergency responders. So it's best for you to know how they operate so you know how you can work within their system to help them. Obviously, you're not going to be fighting a fire, but you will then know when it's most opportune for you to be able to get into your facility, work with them to rescue your materials. The other materials shown here, the Field Guide to Emergency Response, is great for planning and as well as responding when you do have an emergency. And the Emergency Response and Salvage Wheel pictured in the center is a wonderful tool to help people not necessarily familiar with salvage techniques to do the first response to collections. Heritage Preservation worked on a project with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Risk Evaluation and Planning program. And it's a resource that can help you identify hazards and prioritize risks and develop a plan for your institution. Ask your local emergency management director to accompany you on a walkthrough. They can help you prioritize risks and put together a really solid program. Obviously, you don't want to ask them to write the plan for you, but they'll be really great in helping you style it in such a way that it's usable as well as useful. And finally, the guide here, the Guide to Navigating Federal Emergency Management Agency and Small Business Administration Disaster Aid for Cultural Institutions. This booklet walks you through the process that your institution will have to follow as a private nonprofit to obtain funding following a disaster. And so it's really important to know this information before you have to start recovering. I think most cultural institutions and even most individuals do not realize the complexity and the overwhelming nature of trying to secure disaster assistance following a disaster. So do what is well shown and demonstrated by emergency responders' plan. The emergency managers are very document-oriented. And so it's important to make sure you have all your documentation dry and safe and readily available when something happens to your institution. So have copies of your collection inventories, personnel records, financial records, updated insurance, detailed building infrastructure maps, photographs of the building, as well as collections. You'll need all of this information to recover and to apply for disaster assistance. And it's also critical to have connections in place with emergency responders so you can be notified of important recovery events, such as the FEMA public assistance meetings, as well as other things for your family as well. So by being prepared, you'll really have a jump up on when the time comes, when you will have to respond following a disaster. And we'll be posting links to all of these resources on the page where we put the recording after this webinar. Are there other questions? We have about 10 minutes left. All right. I think I will talk a little bit about involvement at the local and county and state level. Obviously, the first place to start is at the local level. And we've gone over today talking about working with your local emergency management director, your local first responders in disaster planning. Some cities do a lot of resident preparation, especially cities that have hurricanes. And these cities often hold a large hurricane meeting every year to meet with community members. So this meeting is a great way for the local cultural heritage community to get to know the city emergency management staff. It's difficult to go as an individual institution, but they never prevent you from attending. You have a much greater likelihood of having some mass and oomph behind the cultural heritage community if more than one cultural heritage institution attends. So I encourage you to get together with other institutions in your community to try to attend hurricane meetings. Obviously, they have happened already, but this spring, when hurricane season is approaching, that would be a great thing to put on your to-do list. Cultural institutions are often used as a safe haven following a storm. And this can be used to your advantage. Many of the stories that we've heard from New York state, for instance, have been the fact that libraries that have not been severely affected have been able to open. They have been able to provide power. They've been able to provide internet access. And even a sense of normalcy to people trying to make head and tails out of a life suddenly upturned. And so if you can make your institution a safe haven, you can use this to your advantage because you can be considered a critical facility. And more emphasis would be helped in getting you up and running again. At the county level, obviously you want to build up from the bottom and work your way up. But many states are organized at the county level as well as the city and state level. So the county works with local jurisdictions on developing emergency plans that enable these communities to be prepared for any possible disaster. And to do this, they collaborate with a huge number of community organizations. So the local cultural heritage community should get involved in the conversations. One of the groups of responders that's listed in the poster is the Local Emergency Planning Committee, LEPC. These are in, I suppose, nearly all communities. And this is a committee that you should try to become involved in or at least attend meetings of because the Planning Committee does exactly that. They plan for the community. And if they are not including cultural heritage institutions in that planning, there's a segment of the population there that is not being looked at, attended to, and is not part of the solution when something has happened. So see if you can't get involved, at least in attending a meeting or two of the LEPC in your community. At the state level, your state emergency management agency website is a great emergency management primer and resource for the public. There were amazing pages that were set up when Heritage Preservation started posting contact information for states that have been affected by federally declared disasters, which, unfortunately, this year has been more than half of the state so far. The emergency management sites have a lot of information. They have Facebook links to their Facebook page, to Twitter, and provide a wealth of information at the local level, as well as links to federal information from FEMA about disaster recovery. Read the state plans. That exists. All states have all hazards plans. And get to know the structure of emergency response by reading those plans. Ask for a tour of the Emergency Operations Center. It's a really mind-opening activity. If you can gather people together and get your local emergency management agency, your state emergency management agency, to open the doors to you, you'll see what kind of coordination is involved when disaster strikes. Dan, do you have other comments to make on different levels of involvement? Just to reiterate what I said earlier, that most of the time, you're going to want to start at that local level and then work your way up. And there's a tendency usually for the government to want to see that happen that way. I don't want you to jump right up to the state without looking what's happened locally and all. So I would use that as your basis for where do you start and all. I think that in some instances, there have even been occasions when you were talking about emergency operating centers where they have a place at the table for cultural institutions, if there are a number of those that are good stakeholders in the community so that they can give some advice when they have these large incidents as to how can we help out or how do we deal with that kind of a thing. So that's another possibility in there. Another way to get into working with local responders is sometimes you'll see calls for people to help with disasters. Hey, do you want to be a victim? We need people to dress up and do that or that kind of thing. And certainly, even though that isn't your forte in cultural institutions, it's a good and fun way if you've got some time to be able to see what happens on the emergency response and the things. And again, maybe get that foot in the door toward a future collaboration because they do appreciate when you take your time out to help with those things. I did want to mention also that as we're getting closer to the end of the webinar, you hear a lot of this stuff. And sometimes it seems very overwhelming, especially if you don't have a plan at all or it's been a while since you've done anything with it. And certainly in my world, I mean, this is what I do. And so it can sometimes consume you and you think, well, why don't other people feel as passionate about as I do or whatever? Well, I guess you have to look at it from the standpoint that everybody is in their little niche of what they like or what their passions are. And the people that are on this webinar are listening and all obviously have a great love for collections and for cultural items and materials. And so that is their thing too. What I would say is don't worry over and over about this kind of thing, but get it taken care of. We know you have a lot of things that are pulling at you and a lot of things you've got to be concerned about. And what we primarily are wanting, I think, from the emergency response and is get it taken care of so that the plan is there. You know what you're going to do. You know how to do it. You've practiced it. And now I can indeed put it up on the shelf and not worry about it. Because if having forbidden something ever does happen, it's just going to be put into place and we're going to execute it and then we'll get through it. So spend some time on it and then move on. Don't belabor it over and over and over again. And as we've said over and over, please do take advantage. I mean, your taxes help pay for what I do, for what most of your emergency responders do. Take advantage of the services that we have. Get out there and make those contacts and those collaborations. And hopefully the folks in your area will lend that hand back to you and help you out with what you need. Thanks, Dan. Elsa. Yes, we are at time. We'll be able to post that recording shortly and link to these resources. And I also just want to encourage everyone to use the discussion forums that we have on the home page. We answer any questions that are posted there, and it's also a great opportunity for you to talk to your colleagues at other institutions and find out what they've done on this and on other topics. And for all the audience out there, I'm sure that Lori and I, if anyone wants to talk on offline or whatever, would be glad to answer emails and that kind of thing if you just need a little boost or just a little bit of advice about this whole topic. So please don't hesitate to contact us. Gido, thank you, Dan. That's great. Thank you both very much. We'll be posting things shortly on the website. We can continue the conversation there. But Lori and Dan, thanks for your time and for all your advice. Very welcome. You're welcome.