 I'd like to invite Sarah Rooker from the Norwich Historical Society and Mark Bradley from the Town Hall Theater to come up and share with us a little bit about their work in developing an emergency plan. Hi, I'm from Norwich Historical Society, which is a typical small historical society. It's got a two-story frame house, a half-time employee, a really dedicated board, a huge group of volunteers, most senior citizens, no climate control. When I arrived there was a very open place with the key where the entire town could find it on a hook on the back door. The password to everything was the same, one word, all lowercase. And it was just a very casual place and everybody felt like it wanted it to be a very open community. Museum, I still want that to happen, but I really didn't like that key sitting there, especially when I arrived one day and found a homeless man spending the night in our shed right underneath the key. And it gave me an excuse to make that change without really offending anyone in town. They all agreed we needed to do that. But when we decided to embark upon disaster planning about two years ago, we started by looking at our risks, and we had had a risk assessment done of our collections back in 2012 by MJ Davis using the Heritage Preservation Risk Worksheet, and it was a good examination of the collections and of the building, but I really felt strongly that we also needed to take a look at the risks to the people and to our operations at the Historical Society. One of the things that we found and started to identify included risks of falling on really steep stairs with very loose carpet, a really poor alcohol use policy, lack of a capital reserve fund, risks of identity theft with our computers, and then some of the collections issues as well like worrying about losing power in the winter and frozen pipes and burst pipes. In addition to creating this risk assessment, we also invited in the fire chief to tour the building and point out issues that he might see, and he pointed out things such as knob and tube wiring in many of our light fixtures. So we assembled a group to work on the project. We had people from our facilities and collections committee. We also invited the local library, a neighboring historical society, and someone from the local church, all of us who had cultural collections that we wanted to consider. As Meg said, interdependence in building a support network is really important, and this was the foundation for that. So it was including people in our community and in the next community. Rachel Ornith then came and started training us, and there she is starting to help us. I don't know, you're explaining something very carefully. And it became clear about a year after we did our work, how important it had been that we had all been here together because you're all going to laugh at this photo. Cars also go into the walls of barns. This is the Thetford Historical Society, and just maybe three months before this happened. I had called Thetford and asked to borrow all of their school desks because we had been chatting during all these workshops, so I had actually just taken all the artifacts out of that room where the car landed and saved the town's school desks. So lots of things began to bubble up as we started to get to know each other and build a little bit more neighborliness with our other institutions. We began to address some of the risks. We did some electrical repairs. We got the fire chief floor plans. We labeled all our utility shutoffs. We took down that really loose rug and started cleaning that. We began a reserve fund. I changed all the passwords. So as we were starting to plan, we were also starting to address some of the easier risks that were highlighted. We started gathering our emergency contacts. We had phone numbers and policy numbers for insurance all gathered, utility account numbers, all the utilities with the names and the phone numbers. And we also included in our list museum professionals and in the community and neighboring museums so that we, again, we're starting to build that know your neighbor. Because I think in the end, I think the thing that one of the things we learned most from Irene is how important it is to know your neighbors. We also had to work on deciding who was going to be on our response team and how the tree was going to work. It was pretty challenging because we had some people at the Historical Society who'd been really involved in taking care of the site for a long time, but they were aging rapidly. And I honestly didn't think that they were up to the task of responding to a major disaster. Some people on the board are out of town part of the year. The collections chair can't see to drive. Someone lives up too high on a hill and a stream often washes out her driveway. So we had to consider all these different pieces to get a responsible phone tree together. And we got it together, and I've already, I already have to change it this year just because the age of the people that we work with at the Historical Society. And we also ended up with not everybody on that list being on the board just because of the matrix of complications of getting them our emergency contacts. I began working on getting all our digital assets together as well with phone numbers. I wrote down our internet service and our website host and our past perfect contact for our collections database, et cetera, et cetera. So this is a constant ongoing piece where we have eight people sharing a computer, everybody in and out of it, and making sure that it remains robust, backed up, offsite, all of that with really clear backup procedures written down was a really important step to being sure that if something happened administratively we could keep going. The biggest project after we had all these pieces done was beginning to prioritize our collections for salvage. We have a full inventory now of every artifact in the collection. The archives are still working on. And the collections committee has gone through every single artifact and prioritized one, two, and three as to which ones we would want to salvage first. Red tagged them all and started to put them into specific areas in the storage rooms. It was a huge project, but it also allowed us to begin to prioritize what we accept into the collection and what we don't. And we started to have a much deeper understanding of the cultural value of the collections. It was also an important piece to help our volunteers start to understand that just because something wasn't a red priority didn't mean we didn't care about it. It was just these were more vulnerable than those, or these had more historic value than these in terms of what we wanted to deal with first. A huge part of many museum disaster plans includes lots of information about salvage and what you're going to do and how to take care of the collections when there's a disaster. And I actually pulled 90% of that out of our disaster plan. And this is our disaster plan here, which you can feel free to look at at some point. But I adapted it pretty heavily for an all-volunteer, well, pretty much all-volunteer organization to the most basic triage because I really felt like if we were in the midst of some major disaster, we're going to call from Unhistorical Society or we're going to call Rachel, we're going to call on the experts, we're going to call all those neighbors that are on the list so that we can get help quickly. So we just put in the most minimal information of how to get started. Now, training and testing the plan I think is incredibly important. We gathered all the people who were listed in the plan and then the phone tree together. We walked through the red binder. Everybody got one to take home. I used a model that was a combination of Anne from the Precision Museum and the D plan from the Northeast Document Conservation Center and some information from Rachel. But I adopted it pretty heavily and made it very large type. So you could read it quickly and it would be more easily accessible to the volunteers. So we walked through that whole red binder. We really talked through scenarios. Didn't spend a lot of time on salvage, more on, okay, so you're in Florida. Who are you going to call? How's this going to all work out? And look, we went and toured the building really carefully and found where all the shutoffs were and learned how all the systems worked and those kinds of things. Well, soon after we finished that, I was, as part of our mitigation we had, started to do some electrical work. And so the electrician was in the front of the house and I was sitting at my desk and I got a phone call from a board member out on Captiva Island in Florida. She says, is the house on fire? I said, what? You know, I got a call from the fire alarm company and the alarm's going off and I'm at my desk and suddenly he was banging on the door and I look out and there's a whole fire department, right, on our front step. I was like, well, hello. And it turned out that the dust that the electrician had sort of started to gather had set off the alarms and the fire department had come and for some reason, A, our alarm did not sound. It just silently went off to everybody but me. And two, they tried calling me but my cell phone was off because I had been at something like this and had forgotten to turn it back on. And then the next person wasn't home and the next person wasn't home and it ended up calling someone who was on the list who I didn't even know was on the list. She was in Florida. So that gave us an opportunity to double check with the fire alarm company and make sure we actually had the same list as what was in the disaster plan. So training and testing is an important piece. Finally, I just wanna say that disaster plans also have to be living documents. We already have a new board. We already have a new fire chief. Our team continues to sort of age and turn over. And we have to keep everybody on the same page about it. So this past fall, there's our new fire chief. I brought him in for a tour and then I asked him to come back to do some training with our fire extinguishers. Now I don't think that we're ever really gonna, probably won't need to use these fire extinguishers. And I didn't, it wasn't so important about caring so much that they all knew how to use fire extinguishers. What I really wanted was the fire chief back again to meet everyone. And I wanted everyone to have in their head that we have a disaster plan and something could happen. And it was really about building that relationship between all our board members and the fire chief. Way more so than learning how to use a fire extinguisher. But that made it really fun too. And everyone felt like they had this grand sense of purpose. So I think if I could say anything, it is all in the planning. It is all in keeping it a living document. It is all in building neighborliness in your community and with the cultural institutions nearby so that you can rely on each other. Thank you. My name is Mark Bradley. I'm from Town Hall Theater in Middlebury, Vermont where we have had two outdoor events canceled because of thunderstorms this summer. So I think there's some truth to that. We, I think I was invited because we're not an expert on disaster and emergency planning. But we recently went through your consultation that has meant a lot more to our organization, I think, than we had initially thought. So I thought I would talk a little bit about our experience going through this process. So Town Hall Theater itself is a historic facility that was built in the 1880s. Town Hall Theater Incorporated has only really been around for about 11 years. So we're a very young organization and we're still learning about our facility and about ourselves as an organization. I have been at Town Hall Theater for just over a year and I thought to give you an example of sort of where we are right now. I'll tell you about my first day at work. It was about an hour after showing up to the office. I had my orientation and I'm sitting down getting my computer set up. And all of a sudden it was, water just started pouring out of the ceiling right into the middle of the business office. And I thought, well, that's unusual. And I turned to my coworker, the operations manager, hoping to seek some guidance, you know, that's my first day. And she looks me dead in the eyes and says, it's the goddamn Germans and runs out of the room. And I'm sitting there alone with just water everywhere. And it turns out it was the Germans. The German language school had been rehearsing on stage and they had built a working fountain and that had collapsed and spilled water everywhere. So first day at work. We're all insane. But that's how we learned that the stage drains into the business office. So that was, you know, our first sort of crash course with disaster planning. So funny enough, a short while after that, I got an email from Vicky Pittman at the Colonial Theater in Key New Hampshire that mentioned the Performing Arts Readiness project and suggested that perhaps we would participate. And I thought, well, that's a great idea. And so we did and it was easy. I mean, the only cost for us was the staff time, which is not of no value, but it was good. So Sean visited us last December. He came and he did a site visit and interviews with everybody on staff and then prepared some recommendations for us that we're probably forever going to be in the process of implementing. The consultation centered around three key areas, emergency management and preparedness planning, business continuity planning, and risk assessment and mitigation. So on preparedness planning, it turns out that we already had a history of doing so with the front of house, but nobody knew about it except for the ushers and the front of house manager. We actually went into the desk and we were like, oh my God, there's a front of house manual here and like a contact list and stuff. This is awesome. So our takeaway from that was, I mean, you assume that when you're a really small team that are constantly talking with each other day in, day out, I mean, and we're open seven days a week. We have more than 150 public events per year. You would think that we're really, really close, but even in an organization as tight-knit as are, as we found that there was actually a lot of information silo going on. Even our facilities manager for two years had been collecting complete documentation for every single piece of equipment in the building, but nobody knew where it was or where he was keeping it. So Sean recommended that maybe we should share this stuff with each other, which I thought was a pretty good idea. On business continuity, a lot of it had to do with ensuring that programming could continue and that we had access to our IT infrastructure. We, he helped us identify those. Obviously the programming is sort of core to who we are as an organization, but we can't really do that without access to our CRM and ticketing system. So the interesting thing about programming, because let's say the building falls into the Otter Creek, what do we do then? Well, how about using some of the other venues in town, but that involves building relationships with people and some of those were in place, but some of them were not. So we've been reaching out a lot more. And as it turns out, next summer, we won't be able to use our facility because of this huge rail construction project. So that, I mean, it's not gonna be dangerous, but it's gonna be dusty and noisy. You can't put on an opera in an environment like that. So I have to say I was pretty glad that we started planning for that earlier because we have other options now for bringing our programming. The IT infrastructure, fortunately, I guess, okay, I'm not entirely a bad millennial. We've fortunately been able to get almost all of our software in the cloud so that we can basically, we can almost run the entire business on a mobile device. So I'm very happy about that with all the backup procedures, which are not as hard as I thought. It was really intimidating at first, but it's just a matter, of course. So I wanted to, so I'll get to a few takeaways, really. I don't really know how to put this exactly, but we realize that so much of this is about documentation, planning, and teamwork that a cultural shift was needed in our organization. And then disaster and emergency planning became more about culture than about the actual format that we used. Especially in the performing arts, we like to think of ourselves as sort of a ragtag team, but this stuff is serious. It can, in certain cases, lives are at stake. So that's what we've been working on and it's taken more than a year, but I'm really proud that we're very, very close to having our first red binder like that. It's gonna, we're gonna, I'm telling you we're gonna be so proud of it. And I have proof because when Leon started labeling all of our outlets, he brought that label machine into the admin office and we all looked at it and everything is labeled now. So those red binders are gonna be in every single room clearly accessible because we're just so happy that we've done this. But you know, I mean the other thing too, arts people, we don't let, you know, we joke about having SOPs. It's like, oh, are we gonna need a standard operating procedure for mopping the floor? And it's like, well, maybe not, but we should certainly have one when we need to evacuate the building or make an insurance claim or all of these other things. So, but to have a standard operating procedure, you need to have the culture that values documentation, review, and communications plans. And so that's really what we've been, I mean the impact of this consultation was not just what we've been talking about today. I mean, it's been pretty fundamental to our organization, so thank you.