 Jenny, go ahead. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much, Mike. As Mike said, I'm Jenny Arena with Heritage Preservation. And thank you guys so much for joining us today. This is, as I'm sure you already know, is the first webinar for the course, Risk Evaluation, First Step in Disaster Planning. Now, the course is part of a series called Caring for Yesterday's Treasures Today, which has been made possible by a lower Bush 21st century librarian grant program from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And we're so fortunate to have Learning Times on board to help us with these webinars and to also provide support on our website. So again, keep saying hi over in that chat box. We have almost 200 of you guys logged in right now, which is fantastic. I'm going to quickly go through some logistics, and we'll try to power through this and get right to the presentation. So for this first course, we'll have a total of four webinars. Today's webinar is, of course, overview what disaster planning entails. So each webinar is 90 minutes long. Our second webinar will be this Thursday, the 7th at 2 p.m. And then we'll have two more on Tuesday the 12th and Thursday the 14th at 2 p.m. So as I mentioned, turnout has been fantastic for these webinars, which does present a little bit of a logistical challenge in tracking everyone's participation. It's really important to us that we keep track of our participants and we're able to report back to IMLS on how this project is going, the effectiveness and impact of it. And to also demonstrate that funding for programs like these are important for the future. So I'm going to just go through some basic things to make recordkeeping a little bit easier and to make life easier for you all. So the first here, what you'll see on your screen is what you should have seen when you registered for this course. So for this particular course, you should have registered at least one week before our start today. And of course now registration has closed. So once you register, and this registration page is three pages long, you'll get thrown into our database where we are able to track attendance and your permission form along with your contact information and homework assignments. So if you're not registered, we don't really have an effective way to track your participation. We don't really even have a way to contact you. So if this page doesn't look familiar and you don't recall filling out three pages of information, please contact us as soon as possible so we can get you squared away. So another thing that we asked you guys to turn in was a permission form. So this permission form is required to earn a certificate of completion. And it's due along with all of the other requirements no later than February 21st. A link to this permission form can be found on our registration page. So our records indicate that everyone who registered for this online course were missing about half of our permission form. So make sure to turn that in by the end of the month. So just a few more things about earning a certificate. Of course, you have to register. We need your permission form. But there are a couple of other things that we're asking for. We're asking for you to attend each webinar. So we'll take attendance about half an hour into this webinar. And the way we take attendance is when you logged in today, you entered your first and last name. And in a half hour, we will grab all those first and last names and write you down as having attended. So if you're watching with a group, I know we have a couple group members. At the end, towards the end of this webinar, we'll go ahead and take a group attendance. So I'll ask you to put everyone's name in who's watching with you who did not enter in their name to log into this session. So if you must miss a webinar, just please know, and I'll put up an email address in a second. Within 24 hours of this live webinar, we will send you all a link to the recording. So if you missed it, you can watch it again. Or if there's something you want to go back to to learn more about, you'll be able to do that. But we are not posting the recordings just yet to the website. We're going to save that until the end of the month. So our final requirement is homework, which we have set up in SurveyMonkey. And we'll go into homework in just a second. But just a reminder, all of these things are due by February 21st. So, and to find more information from this course and links to all the homework assignments, there is a course page, which you'll see at the above link. So if you need anything, it'll be on that page, links to the homework assignment. And we'll also link to resources that we mentioned in this webinar. So back to homework for just a second. Don't panic about homework. It's really path or fail. We're just looking that you've done it and making sure that we're communicating the concepts effectively. It should take about 10 minutes to complete. And you'll submit the homework assignment through SurveyMonkey to Heritage Preservation. Make sure when you fill out the homework assignment to put your first and last name in exactly as you've registered so that we can match you to our database. The same is true when you log into the webinar. Okay, so the online community, some of you have probably already become members. Membership to the online community is not required. You'll never need a username or password to join in on these webinars or to register for courses in the future, but you're more than welcome to join. You'll see the log in there on the right-hand corner of our website. And becoming a member gives you access to our discussion board so you're able to pose questions and respond to questions that other folks have. The community now has more than 2,500 members, including collections and conservation professionals. But please note, you don't have to become a member to participate in these webinars and to register for these courses. We are also really excited. If you are a certified archivist, this course qualifies for archival certification credits. And you can check the website for more information about that. We've been told that this particular course is good for two. Okay, so I know that's a lot of stuff. If you have any questions about earning a certificate of completion, feel free to send us an email. Of course, you don't need to earn a certificate of completion. If you're just interested in learning this information, feel free to watch along. But if you are interested, we do have those requirements. All right, we can move on to our topic. So I'm going to, for now, move away this say hello box. And you will see in its place a Q&A box. And as Mike said, that's a moderated Q&A box. So if you have technical issues, you can write your question in there and we'll keep it private just between us. And if it's a comment for the entire group, we'll publish it. And when we publish it, you'll see your comment twice. So don't worry, you're not spamming the Q&A. You'll just see your comment twice, but no one else will. So today, I am so pleased to welcome our instructor, Alex Sander, or Alice Allard. Alice is the Principal and Managing Director of ArcCare Resources, an independent museum consultancy firm based in Newport, Rhode Island. In her career, she has headed the Objects Conservation Laboratory at the Pacific Regional Conservation Center in Honolulu and has also headed the Conservation Laboratory at the Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography. In 2004, she became a certified member of the American Institute for Conservation Collections Emergency Response Team, and Simpson has been teaching Cultural Resource Emergency Management. So Alex, I am going to go ahead and pull over your PowerPoint and then pass things over to you. Thank you, Jenny. I see the PowerPoint. This is very impressive and good day to everybody. Welcome to the webinar. I hope you're all toasty and warm and not experience any extreme weather events or any disasters out there. And truly, welcome to everybody from Sweden to Hawaii to down in Mexico and New Zealand. I saw some of our far-reaching, far-flung members. Thank you for joining in, and welcome to everybody on the Continental U.S. too. So this webinar is the first in a series of four. And through it, I really hope to build your confidence and focus your efforts to start planning in anticipation of creating a disaster plan for your collection. But I do want to remind you that today's webinar is just an overview. I'll be touching on the high points as disaster planning is really more commonly a full day or even even a multi-day workshop. So I know creating a disaster plan can seem pretty daunting. It's always on the to-do list, but it never quite makes it to the top. But recent events such as Hurricane Sandy in the east and the wildfires in the west and the tornadoes in the southeast, they all underscore the need for a plan. I'm hoping to inspire you to start the process by giving you a better understanding of the essential information and resources and how to go about finding the information needed for a plan. We'll stop along the way for questions, so stay tuned and get your questions ready. So this webinar introduces the terminology of disaster planning. It's going to also discuss key elements, key components of a disaster plan, and identifies the various puzzle pieces that eventually you can put together to make a real plan. I'm also going to alert you to the importance of establishing a relationship with your local emergency responders and how to find them in your community. And then the last section of this webinar provides a range of resources that can help jumpstart the planning process for you. Now, I want to alert you here that you may be seeing or hearing the words emergency and disaster used interchangeably throughout the webinar. I'll be using the words emergency and disaster interchangeably. Really, can I say, is there an incident that affects collections that's not a disaster and simultaneously an emergency? And it's further encouragement if you like this webinar series, the next webinar series in March, Protecting Your Collections, Writing a Disaster Response Plan will help you put all the puzzle pieces you're going to learn through these four classes together when you need it the most, when you need to respond to a disaster. So let me start with an overview to bring everyone up to speed on the history of the initiative for disaster planning for cultural resources, at least here in the United States. A report published in 2005 by Heritage Preservation called A Public Trust at Risk, the Heritage Health Index report on the state of America's collection was the first comprehensive survey to assess the condition and preservation needs of U.S. collections. The study identified 4.8 billion, that's with a B, ladies and gentlemen, 4.8 billion artifacts are held in public trust by more than 30,000 archives, historical societies, libraries, museums, and archaeological repositories in the United States. The report also found, and this is the impetus for our classes, that all collections in the country are at risk for catastrophic loss due to man-made and natural disasters. Institutions that prepare for emergencies dramatically improve the chances that their collections will survive. A main recommendation of the report was that every collecting institution needs to develop both a plan to protect its collection and train staff to carry it out. The recommendation was the result of learning the dismal state of preparedness for protecting our cultural resources across the United States. What they documented was that 80% of collecting institutions do not have an emergency plan that includes staff trained to carry out a response that includes collection. We're connecting to collections here. So here's my first tip for the day. For those of you that want to make a case to your organization, the Heritage Health Index provides an excellent opportunity for institutions to educate staff, governing boards, local and state decision-makers, and community funders about the preservation of collections and the need for disaster planning. This resource is available at Heritage Preservation Website as a free download. So in addition to the summary report, you can find information on the full report by section, case studies, and selected data. But for right now, let's do a poll, Jenny, to find out what type of collecting institutions we have represented today. And if any of them have a plan or a partial plan or a plan they're happy with, train staff to carry it out. Okay, Jenny? Yes. Okay, so we've got our first question over what kind of collecting institution do you represent, and we'll let everyone fill that out. And I'm going to drag over while that's going. Try not to cover the closed captioning box. The second question, does your institution have a written disaster plan that includes collection? So we'll let those run really quickly. For our first question about the type of institution it looks like more commonly archived, are on board with us today, followed by an academic library. All right, I'm going to move this first question out of the way. And our second question about whether or not a disaster plan, it looks like the overwhelming response is no. So about 103 people have answered no. 71 say yes. And about 23 say they're not sure. So our next question, if you answered yes to this first one, so our 106 people, does your institution also have staff train to carry it out? And we'll go ahead and let you guys have an opportunity to fill that out. And it's a mix. It looks like a pretty good split between yes and no. All right. Okay, let me move these off. Thank you guys. Thank you, Jenny. And thank you everybody for taking the poll. It looks as though we've really run the gamut here. We have lots of archives and libraries and we have lots of historical societies and some of those less popular kinds of organizations. I'm really glad everybody's on board. And I'm hoping that we're going to be able to give everybody a piece of information. Those of you that have plans, this will be a good way to test how well they're really doing or at least how you can expand upon them. And those of you that don't have a plan yet or just begin to think about it or a plan that's really not really fluid in your head, I think we'll be able to make some progress with this. So I think it shows that everybody's a good company and you've come to the right class. Well, let's get going here. All right. I think I can safely say that we have all heard about extreme weather events in our newscast. It really is not because we have a dearth of other headlining news. It's the scientists that are indicating that frequency and intensity of some very costly types of extreme events are likely to worsen with climate change. We also have to face an increase in man-made hazards as our populations expand and the demand on the infrastructure in our community grows. So how does this translate for cultural heritage resources? The big question I have for you is, are you ready for a disaster to visit you? Have you tested your plan? So no reason is above being affected by some form of water. Here are two examples. One man-made and one of natural causes. Your water incident could be a malfunctioning sprinkler head going off spraying 50 to 80 gallons per minute at about 300 pounds per second. Or a flood has affected the Czech Republic and Slovak Museum and Library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 2008. They recently reopened late in 2012. So would you be ready for either of these events? A good plan will help you address this kind of disaster, not only for the facility and the collection for being closed to the public for that long. Imagine having to pay your staff for that long. And what would you do if you can't get there from here? This is from the more recent 2011 flooding in Rhode Island at the Tomaqua Indian Memorial Museum. The sleepy little two-foot-wide brook, which dries up in the summer, is, they discovered, aptly named, Roaring Brook. During this torrential, multi-day, freezing rain, March weather event, and I will say the size and length of which no one could remember having happened in the past 30 years. While this tiny trickle of a brook, it turned into a monster. It exceeded any previously known height, flooded the buildings you see in the distance, immersed collections, and tore the road up so much that staff and vehicles could not get there for a week for any response and recovery efforts. If you have completed a risk evaluation and preparedness plan, it might have helped you respond if this had happened to your site. But are you comfortable that maybe you could respond to something like that? Here's another example that I think is pretty impressive. The refitting of the Cuddy Sark in England was the cause of this blazing fire that did great damage to the ship in 2008. They had a risk mitigation plan as part of their disaster plan, which included removing original timbers as they were taken off to another location. They also were ready with a social media plan that they activated within just a few hours of the initial pre-dawn response. They raised an impressive amount of money within the first two days and enough money with several weeks to complete the rebuilding and the restoration. With a plan, you could be ready for public relations and fundraising in the face of an emergency. Do you think you could be that ready? How would you like to come to be the first to find this? Structural failures in the 18th century plaster caused the ceiling to fall down and all over the collections on the first floor in the Redwood Library and Athenaeum, the country's oldest private lending library, with a significant special collection of rare books and fine art. A large portion of their collection is on display and was damaged or contaminated by the plaster. This multimillion-dollar response and recovery effort required relocating the working collections to another site in the community for the continuing use of patrons, as well as the relocation of all library special collection holdings to off-site storage or for extensive conservation work. The recovery period took several years, and not only that, the day before the special collections were due to return from off-site storage, the fine art storage facility caught fire on a freezing, snowy, sunny morning in December. Collections were wet from the farm and efforts, and there was great concern because the collections had not been specifically packaged for storage to resist water. The recovery from this disaster took another several million dollars and a series of years. This is not meant to alarm you, but to alert you that disasters indeed do happen every day in our cultural resources across the country. And when they happen, whether you are prepared or totally unprepared, remember that a plan will help you not panic. A good plan will help you to be flexible and deliberate in your actions to respond to whatever the incident is. So, how do you make a plan? We have so many diverse types of institutions and so many different materials and collections being represented. I'd like to start by considering some terminology that we all hold in common. So, let's do that first. These two terms, emergency and disaster, provide you a starting point for shared understanding with site responders, that's you, and the emergency management first responders. These are terms that will be used frequently in this webinar. All of your plans are built upon the common definition that an emergency is an unforeseen occurrence that calls for immediate action. This includes many variables, including life safety concerns, such as a visitor who trips and falls, or even the lights out in half of the stadium at New Orleans in the Super Bowl this last Sunday. That was definitely an emergency. An emergency also applies to collections, such as a painting that falls from the wall when that visitor tripped and fell. A disaster, however, encompasses a larger bubble of definition that more broadly includes any sudden unplanned event that produces great material damage, loss, and distress. Of course, newsworthy disasters that are also emergencies include the hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, as well as institutional fires, or as in the Redwood case, structural failures in that building envelope. Two more terms are hazard and risk. A hazard is a condition that presents the potential for harm. Hazards come in many forms. They can originate from natural, environmental, industrial, or technical causes. They can be unpredictable, accidental, or human-influenced. The next class on Thursday will raise awareness on different kinds of hazards to consider in your evaluations that you might confront at your institution. The other term that I will be using is risk. Risk is the probability or chance that a particular hazard will lead to injury, loss, or damage. So all hazards, and we are focusing on man-made and natural hazards in this class series, have a risk or probability of happening. Risk management is how you go about evaluating the effect of hazards, what kind of effect they have on collection, the probability of it happening, and how you can best apply available resources to minimize the chance that those hazards will negatively impact your collection. That means that the goal of risk management for the preservation of our collections is to identify your collection hazards, the chance of them happening, and assess the impact they have on collections to identify which ones have the most damaging and costly effects for recovery. A risk management approach to disaster planning provides a reasoned method for considering the most difficult decision we face, how limited resources can best be applied to the protection of collections. In this slide, I think, I hope you can see how some kinds of hazards have been identified, and then the people who thought about them began to rank them. So think about this when we're beginning to identify hazards. You don't have to worry about it now, but we're looking at which ones have a high probability and which ones have a low probability. In addition, when you're thinking of probability, think about what they do if they hit your site. For instance, a flood. If you were to have a flood, it would most likely do an enormous amount of damage. So you put that in the high probability box there. But what's a low probability of happening and has a low effect? Well, maybe your vacuum backfires and sends all that dust out and about. Well, how often does that happen? Not very often. And what kind of damage is it due to your collections? Well, you can probably clean it up in just a few minutes without a lot of resources. So this is just a way of how you begin to structure, looking at where all your hazards are and how important they are and which ones do you really prioritize. How do you go about prioritizing them? But we'll get into that in the webinar number four. So I just want to introduce the concept of risk management to you. All right? So we'll see that we'll be providing risk management tools and examples to mitigate the probability in webinar four. Now, one other big term I want to try... I want to introduce you to and get you used to is the term emergency management. We use it a lot in this webinar. Emergency management is a dynamic process. The wheel shape illustrates that the process is that of continual evolution. It always is turning, it's always moving, and you really know true finish line if you take emergency management seriously. The process involves four phases. Mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Now, one phase is preparedness. Preparedness takes the form of plans and procedures designed to save lives and to minimize damage when an incident occurs. Planning, training, and disaster drills are the essential elements of preparedness. These activities ensure that when a disaster strikes, you will be able to provide the best response possible. When disaster strikes, the best protection is knowing what to do. And our webinar, these three series, these four classes in this series, is one part of the preparedness phase. But we will be referring to the other phases, so I wanted to introduce that to you. So preparedness rolls into a response phase. And the response phase is defined as the actions taken to save lives and prevent further damage to your collections in facility in a disaster and emergency situation. Response is putting, frankly, preparedness plans into action. For collections, it includes staff safety, site stabilization, and collection assessment and triage needs. Commonly is the first two, three, four, five days of an incident and it's the phase before you turn to recovery. Recovery is defined as the actions taken to return your facility and the collections to normal following a disaster. That means conservation, repairing, replacing, or rebuilding. Those are examples of recovery. And often the recovery phase is commonly very lengthy as we've learned from our recent hurricanes. And if you remember back to the slides on the Redwood or the Slovak Museum, it's taken them three, four, five years to actually fully recover from the initial incident. And the last phase, and I shouldn't say last, but the last one in the wheel that's going to start the wheel moving around again is mitigation. Mitigation is the cornerstone of emergency management. It's the continuing efforts to reduce or eliminate long-term risks to people, property, and collections from natural hazards and their effects. Through effective mitigation practices, we can ensure that we lessen our chances of having to respond to a similar disaster again. So mitigation practices include fire safety and prevention, water prevention, mole prevention, and pest management. Quite often it happens at the end of a disaster when you're supposed to get everybody around the table and say, okay, what did we do wrong and what did we do okay? And this is when you begin to tweak and make your plan even better. Because once you do that, then you have to roll right back into the preparedness phase where you update your plans, you expand the instructions, and you start taking training drills to reinforce the new tasks that you've discovered as a result of your evaluations during the mitigation phase. So why is planning important? Well, in fact, there is a significant risk that some type of hazard will cause a disaster at some time in the future at your site. Identifying, understanding, and preparing for those risks are vital parts of museum management and are at the heart of your job responsibility. Having a strong disaster plan that addresses those risks lowers the likelihood of emergencies happening and helps you as cultural stewards safeguard the collections and the stories they tell. A plan also has financial benefits as it mitigates against insurance claims and costly conservation costs involved with response and recovery. Following the guidelines of the Alliance of Museum, a disaster plan is also one of five core documents that are fundamental for basic professional museum operations. Having a plan embodies core museum values and practices, whether you were a trustee, an educator, a facilities manager, a director, a custodian, a collection manager, or work in human resources. A plan is important because collections are the heart of the mission of your organization. They have the reason your organizations exist. How would you tell your stories if your collections were ruined by a disaster? So protect your job. So now let's turn to learning about the parts to a plan. I'm going to go over it in the next portion of the webinar and reference this outline that is in your resource packet. You can look at it after the webinar to refresh your memory and share with colleagues. It is named Suggested Contents of a Basic Emergency Plan. It's been produced by Heritage Preservation, and it's a single-page PDF file that identifies the essential types of information to include in your disaster plan. So looking at the plan, these are the seven essential elements that tailor a plan to your institution's facilities and the specific circumstances. A plan should be flexible enough to cover all threats or hazards relevant to the institution. It provides all the current emergency contact information to activate a response and to protect staff and visitors, as well as your various structures and collections. A plan also specifies how to protect, evacuate, or recover collections in the event of a disaster. It also identifies personnel responsible for implementation and may identify some procedural policies and include documents needed as a response unfolds. Now, this isn't really meant... this is really meant to be an overview, so don't worry if this seems like too much information at the moment. This is simply meant to orient you and begin to familiarize you with the types of information that you will be asked to gather later on, because we're going to go over these in a bit more detail in the following slides, and then we'll be able to take questions. Now, all emergency plans need to include staff and emergency contacts. Whenever the alarm or notice of an incident occurs, a critical immediate function is to call your first responders and to evacuate your staff. Life safety always comes first. 9-1-1 may be all you need, but your plan will also identify other numbers if needed. If an incident occurs off hours, for instance, you will need to inform your staff. Having a staff notification procedure with current contact information is part of a good emergency plan. Your emergency plan also needs to include contact information for your insurance agent and specialty vendors who may need to be immediately available, or at least alerted to the situation and to be on call, such as art conservators or disaster recovery firms. A list of vendors for supply information is also basic information. This can include anything from personal protective equipment, such as hard hats and gloves and masks, to pop-up tents to establish an operation center, to generators, to the more mundane, such as plywood and plastic sheeting. You can learn about emergency supplies in the upcoming March webinars on a disaster response plan with Julie Page. So there's no need to think about making a list right now. Just know that it's one of those elements that's needed in a plan. A third part are instructions. They're the meat and potatoes of a plan. They will outline the first steps to take upon discovery of the incident, including evacuation of staff and visitors to an identified reporting point. Sometimes in the event of severe weather, information or instructions are needed for people to shelter in place overnight. A plan needs to include floor plans to not only provide information for first responders on passageways and rooms, but also with the locations of utilities and building mechanicals, alarm panels, and even your exit doors. These need to be readily available to hand over to your first responders, and they would love it if they were laminated. Instructions also include how to go about assessing and responding to facility and collection needs once you're allowed back into the building. So how are you going to go about triaging? How are you going to go about salvaging? How do you handle things? What goes first? Those kinds of instructions. A fourth element of the disaster plan is knowing your salvage priorities. This is very important to an effective response. Having a predetermined list of the most valuable collections or individual pieces if you're a small site, knowing what you want to salvage will effectively focus your response efforts in a timely manner and save costly resources. Responding to a disaster is very emotional, and having a list and not responding through a knee-jerk reaction for the list is really, really helpful. Priority collections usually are collection records and vital institutional information. This means your collection management database or catalogs if you have hard copies and often certain financial and personnel records. Collection loans are also priorities, as you will have to notify owners immediately and seek permission to proceed with recovery efforts. Another reason you need that collection management database. Other priority collections commonly know they can be icons of your site that are mission-critical and are the connections you have with the public or the types of collections that are prone to irreversible damage by mold if left untreated. But that's for you to decide. Now, another element in the plan. A plan also details how you will communicate with and among staff. How will you do this? Will a phone tree suit your needs? What if the cell towers or phone lines are down? What if an incident occurs that staff are coming to work? What is most information if they need to be redirected? Do you need walkie-talkies or other special communication equipment to ensure you can communicate as your response evolves? Where will you charge cell phones? Your plan can detail the answers to all of these. The other aspect of communication, don't forget public relations. Public relations and your social media presence are critical communication components of your emergency plan. Remember, you want to be in charge of the media. You don't want the media to be in charge of you or put your institution at risk of rumors that are distraction from your recovery efforts. To make your plan sustainable and not just a perfect suitable doorstop, a section that identifies under what circumstances or timeline the plan should be reviewed is advisable. A policy scheduling an annual review or training event provides structured opportunities to update contact information or practice drills that help keep the plan fluid in everyone's head. It is also helpful for continuity if a policy covers who will update the plan and who receives a copy of the plan. This can include not only specific staff tasked with response and recovery responsibilities, but it could be your local fire department, emergency management agency, and on occasion your recovery contractors if you are very clear as to what your priority collections really are. Now, the final section in a plan contains supporting information. We all call those appendices. It can include the types of information that need to be easily accessible and readily at hand. These could include vendor contracts, salvage techniques, critical password, and documentation forms. All of these help round out a comprehensive disaster plan. Now, just know that some plans will be bigger than others, and some may not include all of these elements. Whichever element you decide to build into your plan, however, will assist you in responding effectively and efficiently in ways that minimize damage and the need for costly recovery services. So, how about a break for questions? Janet, do you have any questions anybody would like to ask? Or should we just move on? We do. We have just a few questions. One of the questions, and I believe it came up when we were talking about fundraising after a disaster, I think, was Cuddy Sark. And Amy had a question about shouldn't insurance policies cover a disaster? So there were some conversations happening about what insurance covers and what they don't cover. Well, what they cover is what you're willing to pay for. So one of the very important relationships and conversations you need to have is with your insurance agent. And say, what will you really cover here, and how quickly will you hand me some money? One of the very interesting and helpful aspects of the relationship with the Redwood Library was that their insurance company, which was CHUB, they handed over $50,000 to be able to use right then and there. So the institution, the library could decide where they were going to assign the money right away. They could go out and they could hire vendors because none of those vendors were going to come on site without a guarantee that they were going to be paid. And there were some very immediate needs that needed to be done that required cash out of pocket. And many disasters will have that. So if you don't have enough money on the side to cover some basic expenses as your startup phase, you usually, with a good relationship with your insurance company, will be able to receive that. But if you aren't covered, you won't get it. So find out very carefully what actually is covered and what kinds of incidences they will cover. For instance, if it's a tropical storm and you had damage but it wasn't a hurricane or declared hurricane, that in some insurance classifications makes a very big difference as to what they actually will cover. So it's a question of reading the fine print and it's another question of knowing your agent and making sure he will go to bat for you. He or she is a very valuable advocate for you. So I hope that helps answer the question. And thank you, Alex. We have one follow-up question from Kimberly who says the museum within the federal government, which is self-insured, still have additional insurance. She says we currently insure incoming loans, but that's about it. You would have to look at your own policy. I'm not familiar with your policy. So without reading it or talking to your agents or how it's accounted for, I don't really know. But that would be a conversation to have with your risk management department. Great. Thank you all. We have another question about, is theft considered a disaster? Th theft can be considered a disaster by all means. If it's a very valuable piece, and it is, say, the icon of your organization, it definitely is an emergency. If it creates a lot of material loss, then as it impacts your organization, then it would be a disaster. Great. We have another question from Leigh Ann to get to this in another webinar, but she's curious if off-site storage of plans and records is recommended? Well, lots of us have favorite McGee's closet. So we have to do it a limited space. We have to find other places to put our storage. So what you need to do is evaluate the hazards and the risk of an incident happening in that off-site storage. So that's something that you can begin to evaluate and put it on your horizon. Make sure that it's part of your questions and your answers that you will address. Definitely having off-site storage requires a disaster plan in case something happens there. So you need to find out the information that would impact that plan so you can figure out procedures to go ahead with it. Does that help? I hope. Perfect. We have another follow-up question about insurance. So let's jump back to that really quickly. It's a difficult question, but it's come up in the past. Robert is curious, out of South Carolina, how do we determine costs for items that are not replaceable or are unique? How is the cost quantified for those objects? Well, that's outside of this particular webinar, but my understanding from collection managers is that quite often what some organizations do is have a blanket policy. So they take maybe the top, the value of the top 10 items they have in their collection and they create a policy that will cover that amount of money and they take the risk that their entire organization will not go up in a fire and that any incident they have will be covered well under that amount of money. That's really a question to address to the registrars and the collection management field. It's a little outside of my field. Okay. I have another kind of question from Christy. She says she's an outreach manager. She's interested in more resources for PR and social media during disaster responses. And Alex, we can compile something and make it available on the website, but off the top of your head is that something that exists how to respond after a disaster via a website and social media? Now, I have certain forms that we use in our tabletop exercises. I think I can find those forms. What you basically want to do is have a sort of fill-in-the-blank form that says a disaster happened at such and such a time. You usually want to say we are still assessing the information. You want to really make sure that every staff person, anybody on site knows when anybody asks them that only one person is responsible for answering public relations information. So I will look into some templates that can be used and we'll post them on the website for you. Thank you, Alex. And we have a question from Robert in South Carolina, another one, about what you think our cultural institutions doing anything in regards to disaster recovery planning with global warming events in mind? Well, they're having these webinars. They're trying to get prepared. We're trying to raise the flag with that. I'm not quite sure how to go about answering that question. It's a very broad question, but the more heritage preservation is certainly reaching out, the cultural institutions are certainly trying to work together through the American Association of Museums or Alliance of Museums. They've just changed their name. The different library groups are working together and there's been quite a movement to try to reach out to your sister institutions, both locally and at a distance, to make up buddy systems. So you can work together in a response to a disaster. Well, Alex, that's all we have for now. I'll just mention if you guys want, as soon as we get back to the presentation, keep your questions coming and I'll pull them over and we'll ask them during our next break. Terrific. So let's move on to some resources and maybe some of these questions you will find the answers to in some of these resources. Because pulling all of these different elements can, I know, seem pretty intimidating, but for those of you new to the process, don't feel you have to reinvent the wheel. Truly, fear not, as many have walked the path before you and marked the trail, so your chance of getting lost is really minimized. Plans come in many different formats, from single one-page plans to more involved notebooks to plans maintained and available online. Many are simple, fill in the blanks with names and numbers, not hard when you think how often we text information back and forth. The importance is to start a plan and build upon your efforts incrementally. So you're probably still saying like, okay, lady, where do you begin? Here are the three steps that I suggest. First, gather some staff together and even volunteers from across your organization to create a planning group. The task you want to give everybody is to gather the needed institutional information, such as phone numbers, floor plans, utility information, collection information, prepare that media kit, and so forth. It is much easier if you can divide up the task between a number of helpers. If you can draw upon staff that have different expertise, it can also be helpful. For instance, your facility person probably knows right where the floor plans are and can mark the locations of the utilities in shutoff files. Your financial person probably can provide the insurance numbers and has an idea of the critical documents to prioritize. So divide and conquer. Make a list of the kinds of information, give everybody a couple little tasks, have them come back, and then just accumulate them and gather them all together on the table. The second step is to target a time period in which to gather this information. Six to 10 weeks often works. You can do it in a much less amount of time if you can stay focused, as long as there's a task master to send everybody reminders and to corral it all together. The third step is to familiarize your planning team with available resources. There are many resources on disaster planning. Common ones are shown in this image. We're going to talk about a few more as we go through. For those of you in the southeast, the spiral ring binder there that says, steal this handbook, the resource for it is in your resource packet. It's a pretty comprehensive plan that gives you lots of ideas put together by our library colleagues. So it may be something that's really helpful to you. But frankly, one of the most helpful online resources is the risk evaluation and preparedness planning program right here at Heritage Preservation, right here. They develop and provide resources and training for collection institutions and their staff, just like you, from libraries to museums to science centers to everybody, anybody who has a cultural resource. And they host one of your best one-stop shopping websites for disaster planning resources. So follow the web address listed at the bottom of the slide, and it will bring you to the page you see on the screen. Click on the planning and preparedness resources heading that's circled there. And it takes you to another page full of helpful resources listed by Topical Headings. If you get there, if you want to explore after this webinar, once you get to that page, look under the Plan for Collections Emergencies tab, and you'll find the information and tools to help you plan. You can find lots of information under the tab that says, know your risk, getting to know your first responders. Many of these are free downloads that we'll be using later on in this webinar series, so you don't need to get to them right now, but become familiar with them if you plan on continuing in the webinar series. Now, two hard copy resources that I think are good for everybody, but especially for the smaller institutions are the Heritage Preservation Disaster Wheel and the Field Guide to Emergency Response. The user-friendly emergency response and salvage wheel is not a customized plan per se, but it is a valuable tool, whether you have a plan or not. That's the one in the middle there that looks like a wheel. It's a good place to start pulling together information as it outlines the key information to get you going. It is also meant to hang on the back of your door as a grab-and-go reference tool for an incident response, regardless of whether it's a popcorn burning in the microwave or you left a window open and then started to rain last night, or it's a true evacuation response and you have to leave the building due to the fire alarms going off. One side addresses immediate needs for safety and evacuation with a space for emergency contact numbers, something you already know you need to get. And the other side has essential information on how to handle and triage a range of materials. It's also available as a free download for Apple devices, running on iOS 5.1 and later. There's a free Android version that's now available through Google Play and it's also available for Blackberries. Now, another type of planning guide is the Field Guide to Emergency Response, complete with CD. This is a sturdy copy and a spiral binding. It provides clear and practical advice, outlining in a format that is very useful for planning, as well as implementation during a response. It's a very good way to organize the information and to see what you really need to gather. Those are two really good tools that I think should be on your table, at least for the planning team to look at to see what they like and what they don't like. Now, my personal favorite when it comes to making a disaster plan or a response plan is this free online template called the Pocket Response Plan, or PREP. It's concise and highly portable. It prints on both sides of a legal-sized sheet of paper and folds into a credit card-sized Tyvek envelope that fits really easily into your wallet. This lets staff have multiple copies in multiple locations, from the fridge to the glove compartment, to your wallet, to your desk drawer, to inside your shoe if you really want to do it that much. It is intended to be customized for each institution and is easily adaptable for all types of cultural resources, whether you're a library or a museum or a science center. On one side is the Emergency Communication Directory with contact information for staff, first responders, emergency services, utilities, vendors and suppliers, disaster teams, and other essential individuals and agencies. The second side of this handy little piece of paper contains an emergency response checklist and organized list of those actions that each individual should take during the first 24 to 72 hours following a disaster. For small organizations that would rely heavily on outside vendors to help them with collection needs, this can work as the heart of your disaster plan. For larger institutions, the PREP is meant to complement not replace your disaster plan. But regardless of your size, it ensures that managers and staff have the most essential information with them at all times. Now heritage preservation will be hosting a webinar series on how to fill out and customize this form. It's going to be hosted by Julie Page and it's part of her response series. So look for that. However, all incidents are local and all incidents really rely on our local emergency managers to help us. So in addition to the benefits of all these paper and online resources, one of your best supporting resources are your first responders. Are you on your emergency manager's radar? If you have a good relationship with your local emergency responders and know how their system and practice work, you can help them keep your staff and collections safe. Now every city and every town has a plan. Here the emergency manager has actually made a town model with many buildings that he uses for tabletop exercises. He added two more last year for the local historical society in town library after meeting the administrators and learning more about their special needs. So find out. Find out if they know who you are. Because remember that a response is really a two-way street. Do they know how to communicate and organize their response? Do you know what they do when they come to your site? Do your first responders know your needs? Are they familiar with your buildings and your collections? Do they know your priority collection? Working before a disaster with first responders is really important. And I hope you can see in these images, although well intended, these first responders were more than confused as to how to handle or what to do to save or store or handle this important painting. You may not be sure who your first responders are. You can start with your local emergency management office, which in small towns and rural areas commonly is the responsibility of the fire or the police department. Sometimes in a larger town and in most cities, there is a staff position emergency manager. So if you have a city hall, there might be a staff position within that particular location. Now other first responders who may assist in extra large or large disasters, they're going to be people like your emergency medical technician, the National Guard, and if you live near water, the Coast Guard. For instance, I live on an island and the Coast Guard is the first responder tasked with supporting evacuation needs. So our cultural resources here in Newport have a relation with them in case we need to evacuate something really quickly because our bridges are closed down and we need to get it to the mainland to get it to cold storage or we need to be frozen. Now you may wonder, how do you find them? The most direct way is looking in the local emergency management office in the blue pages in the phone book. For those who live in villages in small towns or rural areas, contacting your local police or fire station and asking for the name and contact information for the local emergency manager will connect you with that person responsible for emergency management in your area. The police or fire chief is commonly also your emergency manager in your smaller towns and villages or even in your region. Now first responders are trained in a large range of special skills to learn more about first responders and the different jobs they do or how you can help them. You can explore the website for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. You can also look at the Red Cross and an organization called the National Voluntary Organization, Active in Disaster. The chapter meetings of the Red Cross and the National Voluntary Organization provide opportunities to meet more first responders. You can learn about the different range of skills they have and hear about other ways that even you can be involved with your community and your institution. You can go to ready.gov to find information on the Federal Emergency Management Contacts in your area too. Now the importance of working with first responders, it reminds me of this 1993 fire. The cause did not start in this landmark historic building. A fire from the restaurant next door jumped onto the roof due to usually high winds coming from an odd direction for us. The fire department was notified about 9 a.m. This institution did not have a written plan. They didn't really have a formal plan, but they knew and had a working face-to-face relationship with their insurance representative and a local conservator. The curator was on jury duty 40 miles away and found out about it during a lunch break when watching the news in the courthouse. At 1 p.m., the director called me as the conservator asked me what to do. She really was panicked and didn't know what to do. I ironically was in Philadelphia at a conservation conference with a theme on emergency response and recovery. I contacted the director and owner of a Boston-based fine art moving and storage company with one foot in recovery operations right then and there. The owner and I had just conversed over lunch about their interest in collaborative arrangement for recovery supplies and services for the many landmark Newport sites. The upshot is, though, that within only a handful of hours and before the fire marshal released the site back to the museum, there was a rigger, a rigging team, and trucks to remove collections for triage and off-site freezer and drive storage. I also want to add that the first responders, because they are emergency managers in Newport and Newport, Rhode Island, has one of the largest number of wooden buildings closely historic wooden buildings in the country are trained in their own technique on wooden buildings. Anyway, they were prepared to protect collections upon entry. They came in with moving blankets to cover cases and minimize smoke damage, and they used special mist nozzles where feasible for the protection of the building, fabric, and the collections themselves. What I really want you to know is that while this site had no formal plan, they did have active relationships with the first responders and primary support vendors. These reasons, these relationships, I should say, were the reason a response was initiated in an early fashion and why they have so successfully risen from the ashes of this fire. So I hope this webinar has helped clarify the pieces to the disaster planning puzzle. But before I finish up with a summary of the next webinar, let's break for some questions. Jenny, can you pass me on some questions? Of course. So we don't have many, but I do have a really great one from Leanne. She says, her museum has an offer from a professional in emergency management that will help write a plan for us that has no museum-specific experience. She's wondering, is it worth it to use this resource? I would suggest she do her own homework first. Most likely, if they have no museum experience, they will not at all understand your specific needs. Museums and libraries need specialty kinds of disaster recovery vendors, not the kind of disaster recovery vendors that you might use for your house, not the surf pros and the residential or commercial disaster recovery vendors. You need the specialty vendors who understand about the special needs of your collections, whether they're fine art, whether they're libraries. How do you go about deep freezing, putting them through a freezer? When do you do that? How do you handle things? What are the hazards in the collections? So I would suggest that learning a little bit more through these webinars and seeing what your other options would be a prudent course of action. Thank you, Alex. So that was our only question so far. So, folks, please keep them coming. And, Alex, if you want to do an overview of the next courses coming up, I will organize some more questions for you. All right. Well, on Thursday, I'm going to be talking about natural hazards outside of your collections, natural hazards that are external to your building. We're going to be talking about weather-related hazards, and we're going to be talking about man-made hazards, and beginning to think about how to rank them and how to identify them. We're going to have resources for them. It actually has some fun online resources to go figure out, so, really, what is outside of my window that might affect my collections? Some of them are obvious, some of them may not be so obvious for you. And then, on the following Tuesday, we're going to be talking about hazards in your collections, and I encourage the library professionals to tune into this, as well as the collection, 3D collection, Fine Art, Museum, Historic People, the Systematic Science Collections people to tune into this, because if you all want to work with your colleagues around the country, or even your colleagues with sister institutions locally, or even if you're connected with your home historical society because you value the stories your own community tells or has to share, this has a lot of information on what makes a hazard in a collection, and what do we look for, and, gee, how do we protect ourselves, and what really does lurk inside my collections? What's the risky business in there? So, that's going to be on that following Tuesday. We're going to wind it up with, now that through these different sessions that you've identified what all your hazards are, we're going to learn how to rank those hazards, how to prioritize them according to your own limited resources, and then give you a whole list of tips and a checklist for you to be able to use so you can actually do some self-assessments and find some easy things to do, low-cost, no-cost things to do, that will lower your risk, and then give you some tips for planning for the bigger kinds of mitigation efforts that you might need to make an argument for. So, I'm hoping everybody will join in, and I look forward to questions, and I hope everybody will enjoy it. Great. Thank you, Alex. I do have a few questions from our group. So, we have one that a couple people were curious about. Robert is wondering, do you know of any grants specifically for professional help in assessing a plan? Well, if he... I don't know if he's had one of the conservation assessment plans done in the past seven years. That program is a very good way to bring both a collection professional and, if you're in a historic building, to your site to help you identify all your... identify a variety of risks, and then to help make a short, medium, and long-range plan with action steps for how you can begin to address them. I believe, also, the NEH program for smaller institutions also will support funding for disaster planning. Other than that, I would look at some local resources and see if you have anything that's locally based. I don't know... I'm not familiar with his area, so I can't help him with that. I only know those things in... mostly in New England, which is where I'm generally based when it comes to fundraising efforts. Okay, so I have a... it's more of a statement, but I'd like your opinion on it, Alex. So Ken in North Carolina, he says, in rural North Carolina, our fire departments are volunteer groups, and these guys literally laugh at requests for specialized care. He says, we would have to train the emergency services. Do you have any recommendations on how to approach a group like that who maybe might not be open to working with their cultural institutions? Well, I'm going to give some tips in the next... I think it's the next webinar... the next webinar on how to connect better with your first responders. So... and there's a whole worksheet that we have. There's a whole poster you can use. So there's a whole series of things that you can do from, well, just from calling them up to taking your information to just asking them if they'd come and show you how to do your... how to work your different fire extinguishers. So I think we'll be able to give you some tips in the next webinar that I hope will be really useful. And if you can go in mass, if you can go as a force, if you have another cultural organization and you can both go together, you can even take them the Heritage Health Index. You can print that out and give that as some information. Tell them how important you are to the community and what would happen if your resources were lost. How would your community tell its stories? Tell them... find out what kind of icon you have and bring that to their attention. Another way sometimes that works is give them all a family membership to your organization and invite them to come. That way they get a little bit more engaged, you become a little more visible to them, and they learn a little bit more about you. And just through osmosis, you become a little bit more important. So maybe that might help. And we did have the recommendation of inviting them to a fish fry, so keep that in mind. All right. That sounds good. Can I come too? We only do cookies at this end. So Lori Foley recommended in response to someone who is curious about finding someone to review their disaster plan. She says local force responders are usually, as we've seen in all cases, usually eager to evaluate your disaster plan from a safety point of view. They wouldn't know about your collections, but it would be a great start. I just wanted to point that comment out. Thank you. Let me get to our next question. And this is from Christine Harper, and this is great because this is going to come up in your homework assignment. She's curious, once one begins to work on a disaster plan, what's the reasonable timeframe for its completion? Well, I think for the planning phase, I'm just going to suggest that you will plan on maybe to pull it all together, just the planning part of it. And then just work on it incrementally, maybe take one section a month at a time or so. It depends how many people you have to work on it together, but do give yourself a deadline. Without a deadline, you probably won't have the incentive to get to it. It'll always become just the way these disaster plans are. It always gets pushed aside for something else that comes to your attention. Give yourself and everybody else a deadline. We have another question from Sharon, and you addressed it a little bit. She's curious, how do you get museum staff and board members to understand the importance of a disaster response and recovery plan? I know you mentioned providing them with the Heritage Health Index. Do you have any other recommendations on getting these folks on board? Well, for your trustees, always talking about how much it would cost, so that's a question of talking to your insurance person, how much it would cost to actually recover from a fire, how it would damage your reputation, or how it would distract your trustees and distract your organization from their mission and the programs that they are trying to do now. For staff, it's really helpful if it comes from the director that says we really have to do this. So if you're with an organization that's interested in core museum and library standards, that really is a core document for most professionals today, is to have that in hand. Okay. I have a question from Robert. I'm not sure exactly what this is in reference to. He's curious on how you locate a collections professional. Robert, if you want to specify, feel free to type that in. Alex, do you have any recommendations on how to find a collections professional? Do you mean for collection care or do you mean for collection management? If it's for collection care, you can go to the American Institute for Conservation website and in the upper right-hand corner, there's a picture that says find a conservator. And if you click on that, it will bring you to a search page where you can fill out a little form that says what are you hunting for and where are you and how far away are you willing to search 20 miles, 50 miles, 100 miles, and you click the submit button and you're up with a list of conservation professionals in private practice, independent professionals who have the particular qualifications that you're hunting for. Great, and I think that I hope that answers your question, Robert. He was referencing having a professional on hand to review the plan. So I think that should do it. So we have about 10 more minutes left in this webinar a link to the homework assignment. As I mentioned, each webinar is going to have a homework assignment, and all four homework assignments are required to earn that certificate of completion. So here's the link to that homework assignment through SurveyMonkey. All these links that we've mentioned today, including the link to this homework assignment, you'll always find on the course homepage. So make sure to always check there. And then I'm going to also pull over our group login. So if you did not enter your first or last name in logging on to this webinar, I assume you're watching with other folks. So I'm going to ask your group leader if you are interested in earning a certificate of completion and would like to be marked as having attended to go ahead and just mark your name down. If you're watching by yourself, you don't need to type your name in. Just your set. And feel free to keep questions coming. We have about 10 more minutes. Alex, I do... I have pulled over some of the questions. We have three questions on this homework assignment, and I pulled a few over. I was wondering... I know this might be considered cheating, but I thought it might be nice since we do have some time left over if you want to kind of a short overview on how so for question one, in your experience in the past what have been some key staff and board members that have been on emergency planning committees? Well, I would say you want to get friendly faces who like to work with you. That's always a good thing to do. And then go from there. I really... If I have the opportunity, I'd like to have my public relations person because my public relations person will probably have a media kit that's pretty much good to go. The facility manager usually knows right where those plans are and it'll take him 20 minutes of his time and asking 20 minutes, people can give you 20 minutes. What they're afraid of is going, oh my God, we're going to go through so many meetings. I don't want to go through a meeting. That's not what you're asking them to do. Just ask them for a short a short amount of time and just find this one piece of information. That's why it's helpful to take those elements and sort of break down the information you want. So we have facilities. Your collection person probably knows where the collection management database is and maybe those passwords. If you have a human resource person or somebody in charge of staff, personnel, they probably have contact information that they can give. It's always nice to have your director or your senior administrator at least on board because they might be able to maybe push on the table with a thumb a little bit and give you a little support to move this along. I hope that gives some insight. We do have a question from Nicole. She says, what if you're in an investigation such as an arson, you're unable to access your facility for response and recovery for a long duration as in a week or a month. How does this change your plan? How would it affect your planning? Well, it gives you a lot more time to plan, that's for sure. What you would have to do is you could get information from your fire marshal or whoever your emergency manager is and if you have a good relationship with them. If you have a good relationship with them, they sometimes can let you in at least to do an assessment. If they will give you access and you understand that you aren't allowed to touch anything, maybe you have to wear special booties, you can at least have a 10 minute walk-through to do your assessment to take your pictures so you can come out and then you know you can begin to plan because you've been able to see what collections or what rooms have been affected and then you can begin to set up to triage or set up the kinds of supplies you need so when you do have access your feet are hitting the ground and you're ready to go. Great, thank you, Alex. I think that's all the questions we have today and hopefully I've got everyone who's watching with a group. So we'll go ahead and end it and let you guys get back to your day. Just a reminder that the next course is coming up on Thursday at 2 o'clock. You'll enter the meeting room exactly as you've done now and just keep in mind that course webpage on ConnectingToCollections.org will have all this information available to you and if you have signed up to become a member of the online community, feel free to continue this conversation on these topics in the discussion board. Thank you guys. Have a fantastic afternoon and thank you, Alex. Well, thank you very much, Jenny and thank you, Mike. I look forward to next week or no, Thursday.