 Go ahead, Susan. Hi, everyone. I see that we have a lot of people from areas where there might be raging wildfires. And I'm very pleased that we're doing this webinar. I've wanted to do one on wildfires for a long time. OK. So we will start. If you have any questions about the care of your collections, you can check out the Collecting to Collections Care Community. And you need to join that. But you don't have to join AIC to use it. So the instructions for joining it are on our website. And do go ahead and do that. We have conservators that monitor the questions and they get answered fairly quickly. And it's a real resource for you. So do go ahead and use it. And you can also keep up with our offerings on Facebook or Connecting to Collections Care on Twitter. And if you have suggestions or problems, you can contact me. And this is my email address. If you need disaster assistance, you can call the 24-hour hotline if you're in the US for the National Heritage Respondery. And coming up, we have a free webinar on archival processing. And then in October, we have a course on cleaning the museum without damage. And that should be posted later today. So if you're interested in it, check it out on our website and that will direct you to how to register. So without further ado, I'm going to turn this over to Donia. And we'll start. Thank you, Susan and Mike. OK. Oh, before you start, Donia, if you have any questions, if you put them in the general chat, I will make sure that they get put in a place where we can answer them when Donia wants to. OK. OK. Thank you. You're on. My name is Donia Kahn, and I am an assistant professor of practice for Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts. But I've also been, for the last several years, a private consultant for preservation for libraries, archives, and museums. And one of the big projects that I worked on recently was developing a curriculum for libraries, archives, and museums, as well as their local firefighters. And it is Finding Common Ground. And it is a curriculum that is available on the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners website. And I believe I included it in the Fire Handout. Correct me, Susan, if I didn't, and I will get that to you. But Finding Common Ground takes cultural heritage institutions hand-in-hand with their first responders in working through the process of risk assessment, disaster planning, and disaster response. So if you have a chance, take a look. And the reason that I'm mentioning this is because through this project, I worked hand-in-hand with instructors from the Massachusetts Fire Academy. And they were an unbelievable wealth of knowledge about fire. And one of the things that you may or may not pick up as we go through this webinar is that fire is actually very exciting, as well as terrifying. And your firefighters will all agree that they love fire. So they get very excited when they talk about it. So it was a lot of fun working with them on this project. So as we start, Mike has put up a poll for us. And I'm just curious as to how many of you have actually experienced a fire at your institution. So if you could take a moment and answer that, I think we've still got a few people to chime in here. But it's nice to see that a lot of you haven't had this experience. For those of you that have, if you have some helpful hints to give us as we go through this webinar, that would be great. That way all of your colleagues can either share the pain or learn from your experience. And that's part of what makes these webinars so great is that we can learn from colleagues across the country that we may not ever see or meet face-to-face. So what we are looking at today is we're going to be looking at the character six of fire. We're going to find out what the fire department actually does while they're fighting a fire. Because I know for many of us, it's not something that we either A, thought about or B, actually know anything about. And then to finish out the webinar, we're going to end throughout the webinar, but really as we finish up, we're going to take a look at what we can do to prevent fires in our institution or to make fighting them easier for our first responders. So we are going to start out today with some of the characteristics of fire. And I'm pretty sure that all of us have, at some point or another, sat around a campfire and been just entranced with watching this living element dancing in front of us. And it is really an amazing thing. But of course, as we know, it can be incredibly destructive, whether it's a fire within our building or a raging wildfire. And knock on wood, California has been pretty good so far this year, and we're going to hope it stays that way. But we basically have three elements that we have to have in order for a fire to actually exist. And those elements need to be in the right context and the right combination to actually have a fire. So we're all kind of familiar with the fire triangle. So we're going to take a look at the three major elements. Chemical reaction is not as big of a criteria for us unless you have an automobile museum that may unfortunately catch fire. And then you would have some chemical reaction fires. But for most of us, we're just dealing with the three outer elements. So heat is probably the most essential elements that we need for a fire. A fire cannot ignite or grow without heat. This is very obvious to those of us who have tried to build a fire with wet wood. You just can't do it. So water is commonly used in fire suppression systems to reduce the heat. So chemical agents can also be used to reduce the heat, and we most commonly find those in our fire extinguishers or gaseous suppression systems. Fire also needs a fuel source, and that fuel can be anything flammable, obviously, or inflammable if you are of the British persuasion, such as paper, textiles, wooden objects, tapestries, furnishings, books, and pretty much all of our organic-based collection materials, not to mention our building. And most of the landscaping around our building. So what we need to really know about fuel in terms of the fire triangle and in terms of a fire is that once the fuel source is consumed, the fire will go out. So if there's nothing left to burn, no fire. A fire also needs oxygen to start and continue. A decrease in oxygen retards the combustion process. So reducing the oxygen is not necessarily a common firefighting practice for our first responders, but for those of you who still have halogen systems and you haven't converted over yet, those halogen systems scavenge the oxygen. They reduce the oxygen to the point where the fire can't burn. And that's why if you've ever worked in or still work in a site that has the halogen, you will see signs everywhere saying that when the alarms go off, evacuate this area immediately because you would suffocate if that system went off. And you couldn't get out in time. So another thing that I want to tell you about oxygen and fire is that if you have cellulose nitrate film, whether it's motion picture film, photographic film, if you have a lot of this material and it's not in a fireproof, safe, or freezer, just be aware that cellulose nitrate creates its own oxygen when it's burning, so you can't actually put it out. It has to burn through all of its fuel before it will go out. So this is why cellulose nitrate is such a problem for us in our collections and for firefighters is the fact that it does create its own oxygen and you can't put it out. So the vast majority of the fires in our institution really are going to be based around the fuel and the oxygen and how we control those. So this means that the limiting factor in how big our fire gets is going to either be whether it consumes all of the fuel or we can reduce that oxygen level. So how do we do this in advance before the fire department ever arrives? We can help combat this by keeping doors closed and our facility compartmented. By doing that, we limit the amount of oxygen introduced into an area and the fire spread will slow down. This is why if you remember back to elementary school when they were teaching you, you know, check the door handle. If the door is hot, don't go out that way. That's in part because you don't want to open that door and introduce more oxygen to a space, which is just going to increase the rate of consumption of the fuel. On the fuel side, we can limit the amount of clutter that we have in storage and I don't want anybody to say, oh, we have no clutter in storage. Everybody has clutter in their storage space. It's just a fact of life. So try to reduce your clutter. Remove your trash frequently because trash can also, of course, be a source of fuel. And you want to try to do your very, very best to keep your electrical rooms, your furnace rooms, and other areas with ignition sources uncluttered by the storage of combustible materials. We did a risk assessment at each host site when we did the five different workshops in Massachusetts and every site in their electrical room and their furnace room had paper goods stored because there was nowhere else in the building to store it. So it did give us a very good opportunity to have the discussion of why this is not a good idea. And really try to limit as much as you can the use of space heaters. They can be a big problem. 18% of all fires are caused by small appliances. So we really want to avoid that. Likewise, if you have coffee makers and things of that nature in your kitchens, turn not at home necessarily, but at work, turn those off at night and try to avoid daisy chaining. And daisy chaining is when you take an extension cord and plug it into your power strip and then you plug another extension cord into that power strip to keep going on down the line. All of that excess cabling really increases the heat and can lead to sparking and arcing at those plugs. So be very, very careful about some of those things and you can help reduce some of these basic needs for a fire. So all fires begin small. Generally with a single ignition source, sometimes you can get an arsonist setting multiple fires, but that's not nearly as common. And so as the fire grows, it produces more and more heat and transfers that heat to other items in the area. Once those items heat up to their ignition temperature, there we go with that heat from the fire triangle, they will also ignite and this chain reaction continues until all of the fuel or the oxygen is consumed and the fire dies back down. So throughout this process, basically the fire will grow up and out rather than the fires don't grow sideways, they grow up and then out. And they will double in size every minute. So that just gives you a really good idea that the faster you can get somebody on their way to your institution when you have a fire, the better. And unfortunately, as fires continue to burn, they generate more and more smoke and over time that smoke itself becomes a fuel. I'm going to be showing a compartment fire video from Underwriters Laboratory in a few slides and you're just going to see how dangerous, how quickly the fire grows and how dangerous the smoke can become. So because fires start small, if you can catch the fire early on, one trained person with one fire extinguisher can prevent a total loss in terms of the fire, but they have to find it early enough and they have to actually know and be trained in how to use that fire extinguisher. Not so much because fire extinguishers are difficult to use, but you need to really understand the safety implications of using that device because safety will always come first. Conversely, if you don't have people around, and this is the middle of the night, if you have a sprinkler system, which I hope you all do, three sprinkler heads put out fires 70% of the time. So if you're in your institution, stop and take a look and see how much space would be covered by three sprinkler heads. So you may be going, oh, that's an awful lot of water in a small space and that's a lot of collections that could be impacted by water. But as a conservator, I'm going to tell you, I can salvage items when they get wet. I cannot reconstitute them from ash. So wet is better than charred or ash any day. Ten sprinkler heads will put out a fire 90% of the time. So if nothing else convinces you, sprinklers are a very good idea. We all have different materials in our collections as well as in our research in public spaces. And items such as untreated foam furniture cushions, those comfy chairs, have ignition temperatures on par with cotton newspaper and pine. But the big difference is that once plastic materials ignite, which is what those foam furniture cushions are, there is a sharp, sharp increase in the temperature and the fire spreads much faster. The higher the heat release rate, the faster the fire and the hotter the fire and the faster the nearby combustibles are going to ignite. So one of the things that we're going to see in the upcoming video is called flash over. And that's what happens when your fire is burning. And you can see here we've got a lot of black smoke coming up. And at this point where the fire is fully developed, you can see we've now got flames within that smoke. That is the point where the smoke ignites and that is when we get flash over. And that's pretty much the point of no return because at this stage everything is on fire. You will salvage nothing from that room, potentially not even metal ceramics or glass because they will, depending on the heat of the fire, they could melt or deform. So fire is a really amazing element. So as we were talking, we start our fire at an ignition point. So as the fire develops from that ignition point and starts to grow, there are a lot of factors that come into play. Fuel properties are a big one. So what are you burning? Are you burning paper, textiles, modern furniture, historic furniture? Do you have acetate or nitrate film? All sorts of elements are going to come into play in terms of our fuel properties, our fuel quantity. Is this fire starting in your research area that has more desks than collections? Or is it starting in a collection space where you have a lot of very densely packed fuel, let's say? It's going to depend on your ventilation. And we're going to get into ventilation more towards the end of this webinar when we talk about what we can do to prevent fires. But ventilation is either going to come naturally through windows and the shape of your building or mechanically, so your HVAC system could still be functioning at the beginning of the fire. And it could be moving things around, adding a lot of oxygen to that fire. Compartment geometry and what compartment geometry is is basically your room size and your ceiling height. So how much space is there? So think about it, if you've got a small room with low ceilings and you've got the door closed, the oxygen is going to be used up much more quickly than if you were in a high-density storage warehouse sort of thing. So it's also going to depend on the location of the fire within the space as well as your ambient conditions. So the temperature, the wind speed, and things of that nature. That really comes into play when we're talking about wildfires outside, as those of you, especially from California, know all too well about. The traditional fire development curve, which we see here, shows that the history of essentially a fuel-limited fire, the fire starts, it grows, it's fully developed as all of those materials in the room or in the space are being consumed. And then as we get fewer and fewer materials to burn, that fire goes into decay. So if nothing else happened, so your alarms went off, but nobody was there to hear them, and the fire just raged, this is how it would progress. It would start, it would grow, it would be fully developed, and then it would decay. However, this is not how the majority of our fires progress because we actually have firefighters who come in and either help the fire along or put it out. So that curve changes when we introduce the fire department because one of the things that they're going to do is they are going to actually ventilate the space because as it burns, the fire will start to decrease due to a lack of oxygen, and when the fire department comes and vents, that fire is going to spike up again. And part of the reason why the fire department actually vents a fire is because they need to be able to get to the fire to put it out, and so sometimes they have no other choice but to knock down doors or chop holes in walls to be able to get at the fire to put it out because even if all of the space were enclosed, there is still a chance for that fire to burn through a floor, burn through a ceiling, burn through a wall, and then it just starts all over again. So the fire department will come in and control the ventilation to be able to put the fire out. So we are going to move on now, and Mike, if you would please start our video for us, that would be great. So this video is really going to kind of show us the importance of catching a fire when it's easy to suppress. And one of the things that you are going to notice is we have two side-by-side rooms. One, they're calling it the legacy room, and one is a modern room. The legacy room, you can think about being a period room in one of our historic house museums. So we've got antique furniture. It's cotton wool, horsehair stuffing, solid wood. The draperies are woolen. The pillows are feather. So we don't have any plastics. And one of the things you can see is at this stage, the fire is starting more quickly in this legacy room. But we will keep an eye on that, because in our modern room, we have all of these synthetic foam pillows, and we can see, oh, it's not moving. If you look in the center of the room by the white draper, you can see somewhat of a smoke coming up, and it's a dark smoke. This is the fire starting to take off in that room. And when you see black smoke like that, you know you have plastics involved, because you'll notice in the legacy room, we don't have any black smoke yet. So what we're really watching here is now the difference in how quickly the fire is going to spread. The legacy room is still roughly the same as what it was a couple of minutes ago, but now we can really see the flames in the modern room. The other thing you can see is the difference in color in the flames, and that also is telling you how hot the fire is. So we can already see that the modern room is really taking off, and you can see that about a third of the way down, we're getting a black layer of smoke. And so that is going to continue to build, and eventually that will ignite itself. This is also why you're taught when you're a child that you don't run through the house if there is a fire, you crawl, because you can see that smoke layer rises. And so if you want to be able to get out of the house safely or out of your building safely, and there is already smoke, you need to crawl. And you can see now where the fire is in the modern room, and we're still just burning a pillow in the legacy room. We might have caught in the sofa. Hard to tell, but we've got a pretty good conflagration going here now in the modern room. And watch because it's going to transition here very quickly because we've got that really dense black smoke, which in and of itself contains particles that will start to burn very soon. And what you're going to see is little tongues of flame coming out of that smoke. I can see flames at the left now. And so we're starting. And very soon you are going to see flash over as all of that smoke gets consumed. And at this stage, nothing's going to survive in that room, unfortunately, including your firefighters if they are caught there. So part of firefighter training is to be able to anticipate that flash over and be able to get out safely. So our modern room is gone. Our legacy room is still just at a pillow in a bit of the drapery stage. So you can see that our modern room flashed over in about three minutes, 40 seconds. I don't know about you, but I could not call my fire department and have them on site within three minutes and 40 seconds. So working with your firefighters is going to be very, very important because they're going to be able to tell you how quickly they can get to you. And that's in part going to inform your decision. So here we are almost a half hour later. And our legacy room finally is showing some flames and smoke. And there goes the flower arrangement. And we finally get flash over in our legacy room after about 29 some hot minutes. I can't remember when they pegged. It's pretty much, yeah, 29, 25, as compared to our modern room, which was 304. So it is really important to know what you have and what its characteristics are in terms of fire. And the nice thing is that you don't have to know this by yourself because your fire department is there to help. So fire, as we said earlier, generally spreads up and out. And you saw that in the video. It wanted to climb those curtains first and then move out. Unfortunately, for most of us, the way that we have our collection stored is vertically on shelves because none of us have enough space to store it, essentially horizontally on the floor. So unfortunately for us, we've got shelves full of combustible materials. And so for the way that fire spreads, we've got a problem. Luckily, most of our collections would be more akin to what was in the legacy room, so they're not going to go up very quickly. But it all depends on the collections that you've got. So again, being very aware of the collections you have is going to help. So as fire spreads up and out, it spreads predominantly through heat transfer. So when we were talking about that heat element of the fire triangle, fire spreads because of the heat element. So heat is always going to be transferred from the hotter object to the cooler. So we need to have some idea of how heat is transferred to better understand fire. So one way that heat is transferred is conduction. And conduction is the heat transfer between contacting solids. So for example, if the box, if this box right here, this gray box, caught fire for some unknown reason, maybe a researcher was using it and surreptitiously put a lit cigarette in there. Who knows? Once it would start to burn, it would probably use up all of its oxygen first. But once it would start to burn, that heat is going to rise. And because this brown box is in contact with it, that heat is going to transfer to that box by conduction. So that conduction occurs through direct flame and is the most common form of heat transfer that we are going to encounter. Convection involves the circulation of heated air. Most of us know of convection through modern ovens. But convection is often one of the ways that our wildfires spread. So you get this incredibly hot air moving around. And especially if you're in an area with a wildfire with a lot of pine, that sap has a really low flash point. And so that superheated air is also going to be an ignition point, especially in wildfires. And then radiation isn't as big of an issue for us in terms of heat transfer in a fire. Heat transfer by radiation is heat transfer by electromagnetic waves. Basically just like you would experience sitting around a campfire. Now, you can get fire from radiation, but it would have to be an awfully hot fire for it to spread via radiation. So they all come into play in a fire and they all contribute to the spread, but the most common way that fire will spread is through conduction. So we really want to think about how we're storing our collections, how much airspace we're leaving, and really in many ways, again, how cluttered the space is because a lot of this, you know, odd stacking is going to allow for a lot of air flow and that ventilation will just help the fire to spread as it grows. So just be aware of that. Excuse me. So I'm going to take just a second to see if there were any questions about fire. And Jean-Luc, I don't actually know about French ivory. I'm sorry about that. I would be happy to take a look into it if you want to send me an email after this. I'm not sure what your question about French ivory was. If you are thinking in terms of the cellulose nitrate or if it's a celluloid, it does have a lot of the same characteristics, but it's not the same, exactly the same chemical composition. So it's not quite as flammable as the cellulose nitrate. You can actually put celluloid out whereas cellulose nitrate, you can't. So if that hasn't answered your question, send me an email and I would be happy to look into it for you. Okay, so moving on to working actually with our first responders. If you haven't met them yet, I highly recommend it. They're very nice people. They get a little excited about fires, but that's just their nature. So fire, for those of you who have experienced it, fire is a very chaotic event. As we've seen, it's a living entity. And so for those of us who aren't professional firefighters, if we're just looking on the fire department response and operation at a fire is going to look hectic and chaotic. The truth is, is that chaos is actually very organized. Everyone has their assignment and a task to perform, and they do it because they know if they don't, they are putting the lives of their colleagues on the line as well as anybody who may be inside that building. As more apparatus and personnel arrive on the scene, they're going to be added to that assignment and task list, and they are going to get that from the incident commander. For those of you who aren't aware of what an incident commander is, I highly recommend taking a look at the incident command system. If you go to FEMA, you can find out all about the incident command system, and it is what your fire department works under, and the basic principle is that you have one person in charge, it's a unified command, and it's a very hierarchical structure, and everybody knows their role, and everybody knows their place in the hierarchy, and that's the job they do. Put it very simply, it's much more complicated than that. The incident commander is always going to prioritize rescue efforts over anything else if there are any viable victims, or if it is unknown if the building is clear. So if you've ever gone through any sort of disaster training, disaster planning, or just fire evacuation training, they always tell you to have a floor monitor or a building monitor and some way to keep track of who is coming in and out of the building, and this is why, so that you know that you've gotten everybody out. And if you haven't gotten everybody out, hopefully you know where the shelter-in-place locations are. A lot of your larger buildings with elevators now require you to have shelter locations for people who are handicapped, so that when they can't use the elevator, they can go to the shelter location, and that is where the fire department will go first. But they need to know that, and you need to have those spaces properly equipped. So once they've made sure that life safety is under control, there are no victims, the building is clear, and they are going to focus on stabilizing the incident. In the case of a fire, this means that you're going to try to keep the fire from getting any bigger if you possibly can. That does not mean you're not going to ventilate because you do need to ventilate in order to get to the fire, and you can kind of see here the fire department working on creating some vent holes. Actually, this is after the fact to make sure that the fire is out, but they will create ventilation holes and the fire will grow bigger briefly, but that's their way to be able to get in and put the fire out more quickly. So overall, the fire is contained and not as big as it could be. It's going to take a while sometimes for a fire to be under control, but what the fire department is going to be doing is while one team is specifically fighting the fire, you're also going to have other teams, when possible, focusing on limiting damage to adjacent properties. So if you are in an area, I worked in Boston for several years, and you go up on Beacon Hill and it's all row houses, and if one of those starts on fire, you're potentially looking at the entire block of buildings going up, and this is actually why you see a lot of brick buildings in these row house sort of configurations, because they used to be wood and then somebody had a fire and then there were no row houses, so they rebuilt them out of brick. Funny, the three little pigs had it down. So what they're really trying to do there is stabilize the incident. They don't want it to spread and have a much bigger problem. It's akin to what your firefighters do when they create fire breaks. They are attempting to limit the size of a wildfire, but unfortunately mother nature doesn't always cooperate. So the third priority that they're going to be looking at, and these priorities are very much in this order, the third priority is property conservation, and this is when preserving the building or preserving our collections if you have worked with the fire department ahead of time, will directly occur. So your fire department will attempt to throw fire blankets over important collection items, or they will try to redirect water, or they will do what they can to minimize the damage, but only if they have that opportunity. For those of us who have taken courses or taught courses in disaster planning, response, and recovery, these priorities sound familiar. Like firefighters, those of us in cultural heritage collections work with the same priorities in the same order when we're working on disaster response. So we're considering personal safety first, property stabilization second, and then the preservation of collections third. So I'm just going to add to Susan's shout out about the National Heritage Responders. I am one of the National Heritage Responders, and we are there to help after disasters, so please call the hotline if you need any help. And it can, I will be honest, it can be something small as a mold outbreak. It doesn't have to be, you know, the most major disaster on the planet. We have a hotline and the person manning the hotline each month is always there to help with questions. And if they don't know how to answer it, they will find somebody who can help. So you will get help, never fear. I want to just add as a side note on fire department operations that it really helps the fire department if any staff and visitor vehicles are out of the way of the building so that the fire department can actually get there without having to drive around vehicles. It means they can get much more up close and personal and have fewer things under foot. You can kind of equate having cars around your vehicle during a fire as having puppies around your feet when you're trying to make dinner. They just get in the way. And you should also, in terms of the incident command system, have one person who always acts as a staff liaison to the fire department. So there is only one source of contact for the fire department and the fire department knows who that is and they can share information through that one liaison rather than having to answer 15 different questions every five minutes. So be kind to your fire department. So as the fire department is going through and working a fire, we pretty much understand about life safety. That's when you see the heroic firefighter carrying somebody out of a building. And incident stabilization, they're just doing their job to keep the fire itself under control. But what I want to spend some time talking about is what they do in terms of property conservation because this is where for the most part you can have conversations with your fire department before you ever have a fire. So the fire department actually would love to have this conversation with you because any information that they can gather on your institution is going to be incredibly helpful to them in terms of fighting the fire if you have a fire down the line. So one of the ways that the fire department can help conserve property is through salvage operations. Although this is their third priority, with enough personnel these tasks can be conducted simultaneously with life safety and incident stabilization. Property conservation is a tactical consideration at every fire incident, but will be delayed if there are life safety and incident stabilization concerns and not enough personnel. So don't get angry at your fire department if they don't take care of property conservation. It just means they didn't have enough people. Enough fire trucks didn't come out. It's hard to predict who you're going to have be able to come out and help. So one of the tasks carrying out for property conservation is what your fire department is going to refer to as salvage. It's kind of like our salvage but not quite. Salvage is actually for the fire department the protection of your property from preventable damage. So this damage can either be caused by fire, by smoke, or by the water they use to put out the fire. It's done through several different activities such as moving or covering items. So this is where those fire blankets come in. It can protect items not only from fire but from smoke as well as reducing the hose line water flow. If you've never actually watched a fire hose work, a sprinkler system will give off about 30 to 60 gallons of water a minute. A fire hose will be 300 to 600, so a minute. So that's a lot of water when those fire hoses get pumping. So one of the ways they can help is to divert the water so it doesn't come down through ceilings and lighting fixtures and everywhere you don't want it to. They can create little chutes like this one down here to direct the water in a specific direction. You can do similar sorts of slip and slides in your own institution for leaks. So don't think it has to be a fire department thing. You can get polyethylene plastic and create your own slip and slide if you have leaks in your institution and it can really help reduce the amount of water damage. So we can learn a lot from our firefighters. Firefighters, however, will damage property at the same time they are trying to save it. So they're going to break windows, chop holes and pull ceilings for ventilation so that they can then quickly switch into salvage mode once they have the fire under control. So one of the things that you're going to want to consider is making sure that you have spoken with your fire department ahead of time so they know if you've got any historic doors that you have to save, they know what those are. If you've got historic windows, they know what they are so they know these are the ones that you don't want to break into. So just be sure that you are working with your fire department ahead of time. So basically if items are in the direct line of fire, the fire department is not going to typically remove them or cover them just because there's not a lot that they can do and sometimes they can't move anything, especially in the space where the fire started if they have to do any sort of fire investigation. When it comes to smoke damage, we want to try to convince everybody to shut doors at night, creating those compartments that can help slow the spread of the fire and also contain the smoke. And yes we know water damage is a necessary evil of firefighting, but again we can salvage items that have water damage, we can't reconstitute them from piles of ash. So it's really good to work with your fire department ahead of time. One of the really great things that I thought came out of the tragedy at Notre Dame in Paris was how so many firefighters showed up and along with the police department, actually while the fire was still being fought, we're doing everything they could to remove objects in a human chain. And so it just goes to show you can work with your fire department. And we may not all be Notre Dame, but if you have a local fire department and you are a local resource in terms of cultural heritage, the more they get to know you and how important you are to the community, they will really be able to help. So overhaul is what happens when the bulk of the fire is controlled. The firefighters are actually going to start looking for any hidden fire, so this may be in attic spaces, within the walls, within any sort of faucets, any little tiny gaps in the construction of your building, and all of a sudden the word has escaped me. While it may seem to our untrained eye that they're creating more damage, it actually helps them to find any little hot spots that they need to put out because if they don't put those out, they'll sit there and smolder and then the fire is going to start up again, and that's the last thing anybody wants. Sometimes overhaul is limited if you do need to do a formal investigation on the fire because overhaul disturbs the contents and the building construction, and rendering it a lot harder for an investigator to recreate the scene. So hopefully your fires are fairly straightforward. Not that I want any of you to have a fire. Just so you know, the overhaul process can be very dangerous for your firefighters. They are exhausted. They are, you know, just like us when we are fatigued, more prone to injury, and you know, accidents can happen. So just be aware and don't try to force your expectations on them. They need to do this carefully, do it thoughtfully, as well as monitor the air because there is a reason why firefighters wear the apparatus that they do and that is because the smoke and the soot that result from our fires can often carry a lot of carcinogenic materials. And so one of the leading causes of death for years for firefighters is lung cancer. And that's not just at ground zero, but for any firefighter. And so there's a lot of preventative measures in place now for firefighters to try to protect them from these dangers of their jobs. So again, if you see firefighters and they're in your building and they're still wearing all their apparatus, don't go into the building, okay? It's not going to be good for your health and they really don't want you in there because you could become the next accident that they have to respond to. In large part because you don't know the stability of your structure. Your building may have been compromised and weakened to the point of potential collapse. You know, the water from the fire adds a lot of weight. The fire has weakened your joints, your joints. So things are going to be much more fragile than you can ever imagine. That is not the button. I want it. So as I've mentioned a couple of times, the final step that the fire department is going to provide is going to be fire investigation. And sometimes it's very easy to determine the cause of a fire. Sometimes it's not. So we need to give the firefighters or actually the fire investigation team time to do their job. And so some of you may, those of you who've been through a fire, know that the minute that the fire department sets foot on your property, that property belongs to them. You are not the owner. You have no say in anything. You will not get the building returned to you until the fire investigation is done. And unfortunately, sometimes that can take a long time depending on how many other agencies need to become involved. So hopefully for most of us, it will be fairly straightforward how the fire started and you won't have to have your shop closed up for a long time for fire investigation. You know it gets really bad when they have to start bringing in the ATF. And if that happens, you're out of commission for quite a long time. So what can we do to help prevent fires? Oh, sorry, I'm going to take a second here to take a look at the questions. Ah, it's good to hear a happy ending in Georgetown, South Carolina in September 2013. I'm sorry that the Maritime Museum had a fire, but it's great that it escaped total damage due to the combined efforts of fire departments. Oh, that is just so good to hear. And very heartening that it does happen in places other than Notre Dame. So Margaret makes a good point about loaned artifacts, making sure to let your fire department know so those loans can be a priority for protection or evacuation. And that is an excellent, excellent point. It should be part of your priority salvage list for your disaster plan. And sometimes the dust covers will melt, but that's something that you can't exactly control unless you know when the fire is going to occur and you're going to take them off. Where I have worked in the past, most of the times when we've put dust covers on something, it's also been to keep out light. So we've used a very dense weave cotton fabric. And so you could potentially consider cotton muslin, which is not a very expensive fabric, and use that in place of a poly sheet. Of course, it means you can't easily see what's underneath it, but we all have digital cameras now, so you could always pin a tag with the picture of what's underneath that dust cover onto the cotton muslin cover. And that might be a good alternative, but I am open if anybody else has any alternatives. I would love to hear them, but for me, cotton muslin is kind of my default go to. So what can we do to help prevent fires? And I couldn't resist putting in this adorable picture of Smokey the Bear. And that is actually Smokey the Bear. So he's too terribly cute for words until he gets into my beehives. So, Mike, if we could have the second poll here. I'd love to know how many people have actually invited their local fire department to visit their institution. Even if it's just been a casual visit, because the better we can get to know our first responders, the better service we actually get, not because we're special or anything, but they actually know our site and they know who we are and what we do and what role we play in the community. So, oh, it's good to see that over half of you have actually invited your fire department in. That is so fantastic. One of the items in your handout is actually the PDF version of the poster that, I believe it was Heritage Preservation put out, but Susan, correct me if I'm wrong. Working with emergency responders, and it gives you great tips on what to do to prepare for them coming to visit, what to show them when they come to visit, and what areas are important to talk about with your local first responders. They would love to have floor plans of your building and all sorts of information on your facilities and your systems and all of that great stuff, but don't forget to show them just who you are and how many really cool things that you have in your collection, because they like cool things. So, again, build those relationships and it's going to take time, because especially if you're in a larger city, you're going to have multiple shifts and you're going to want to try to get everybody in, but it's a really, really important thing to do and I can't stress it enough. So, one of the things that we alluded to before in terms of fire was ventilation and how important ventilation is to a fire. And one of the things that you really need to understand when you're thinking about ventilation is that the construction of your building and then not just the original construction, but how many times it's been renovated and what those renovations have done to your building have a huge impact on how a fire will react in your building. Case in point, the Los Angeles Public Library. For those of you who haven't read it, Susan Arlene just came out with an absolutely fantastic book on the Los Angeles Public Library fire. It's very sobering, especially when you think that the fire reached temperatures up to 2,500 degrees. That's scary, but part of the reason that the fire was able to do that is the Los Angeles Public Library, as with many of our older libraries, was built around a central tower or a central core. And the way that that core was constructed was you had cast iron uprights. These aren't exactly cast iron, but it was the closest picture I could find to illustrate it. But you had your cast iron uprights that formed the ends of your shelves, and those went from the ground all the way up in a single piece. And so each floor had a little gap around each one of those uprights, and it essentially created a chimney. And that chimney effect really helped the fire spread as quickly as it did and helped it to get as blisteringly hot as it did. And one of the biggest problems was that each of these spaces really only had access by one door. And so the firefighters could not get in to the rooms where the fires were because they couldn't get through the doors. So they had to waste time bashing through concrete walls to get to these fires. And when they did, that only increased the heat, and so it was an incredibly difficult fire to fight. So it's really important to, after this webinar, stop and take a really hard look at your building. How is it constructed? What is it constructed out of? And when you look at all of your different spaces, do you have multiple points of egress from each of those spaces? It's going to be good for your fire department because then they can get in from different angles to fight the fire, but it's also going to be critical for you if, for some reason, you are caught in that space when a fire starts. So become very familiar with the way that your building is laid out and try to get the most accurate floor plans for your building because with multiple renovations, it can be sometimes hard to figure out which one is just the right age and shows all of the renovations. Sorry, my mind is wandering. We also want to know just exactly what we have in terms of fire suppression. And I know many of you already know what you have in terms of fire suppression, but it's still good to double check because sometimes our fire suppression doesn't actually cover the entire building. And sometimes you have multiple kinds of fire suppression units. So you could have a water system, you could have a wet pipe system, a dry pipe system, a pre-action system, or a mist system. All of those are going to be in water. You could have any number of the chemical agent suppression systems. And so it's going to be really important for you to know what you have, what rooms they cover, and then as well what sort of detection systems do you have? Do you have smoke detectors? Do you have heat detectors? Are they actually connected to the fire department? And this would be a great question for the fire department and talk to them about how some of these things work. And it's always good to find out and make sure that you have the right detector for the right space. So for example, if you've got a big open atrium, you're going to really want smoke detectors over heat detectors because the smoke is going to rise and trigger that detector long before a heat detector would ever detect the rate of rise changing. But if you're trying to cover an attic space, you're going to want a heat detector because if you put a smoke detector in an attic, especially in an old building, it's going to be going off all the time because either the dust is going to blow when the wind kicks up or the spiders are going to build their webs, and then the spider web will move and it will set off the smoke detector. So be thinking about some of these things and talk with your facilities people, or if you have access to the company that manages your fire suppression and detection system, it's always good to have these conversations with them just to make sure everything is in the proper order. Again, fire extinguishers are really important to have because the quicker you can get to that fire and the quicker that you can get it put out, the better off your institution is going to be. I like to recommend people have the ABC extinguishers throughout their entire building. I don't want to have to be trying to figure out, oh, this is a paper fire, so I should just use the water, but the water extinguisher is over at the other end of the room, but I've got a CO2 extinguisher right here by the photocopier that I've been working at when I noticed the fire. I like to just make it as simple as possible, but that is up to you to discuss with the company that supplies and services your fire extinguishers. And again, make sure if you have fire extinguishers, you do have somebody coming and servicing them on a regular basis, and that everybody who works in your building not only knows that you have fire extinguishers, but knows where they are. I have worked in so many institutions where in my first few weeks there, because I'm who I am, I always try to go through the entire disaster plan, and one of the questions I always ask is where are all of the fire extinguishers, and it's the most common question that nobody can answer. You just get blank stares. So very important not only to know what kind of extinguisher you have, because the type of extinguisher is going to have an impact on how you fight the fire. So again, get training. Your state fire marshals office will be able to provide training for you. Generally, your fire department won't because they don't actually use fire extinguishers. So they don't really know the ins and outs, but your state fire marshals office would. So they would be a great place to start to get that training. Because the more you know, the better you will be able to put out that fire in its incipient stage and not get yourself killed in the process. That's the important thing about the training. So again, within our collections areas, we were talking about what we can do to help decrease the spread of fire. We can get rid of clutter. We can make sure that when we have things in storage, we aren't storing them adjacent to heaters or we're not. We don't have stacks of 30 year old newspapers sitting around the perimeter of the room on top of all of your daisy chain extension cords. Yes, I have seen that. We are not storing our lawn mower and our gas can in our basement furnace room with the natural gas furnace and its pilot light. I've seen that too. So no matter how bad you think your place is, trust me, I've seen worse, but we can all strive to be better. So we do really want to think about especially things like a lot of our spare boxes that donations have come in. So they're not archival boxes or they're not acid-free, lignin-free, buffered, they're just kind of there. Our storage materials waiting to be used, we want to make sure that everything is tidy. Not only because it's a way to help prevent a fire from happening in the first place, but if you have something like this in the image here on the right, you can only imagine if the fire were back here, how would your fire department get anywhere near the fire to be able to fight it effectively? You know, it's clutter in your IOWs. You may be used to it, but when your firefighters are in your building, there is no light and the smoke is coming down. They can't see. And so you really want to make sure that you keep any sort of IOWs or walkways clear. So please try to resist the urge to squirrel things away in hallways or under stairs, especially in those spur hallways that nobody ever uses because all it does is lead to a fire exit. That would be bad. So we really want to reduce our clutter in the best ways that we can. And I know this is going to be a big job for some of us. But if you invite your fire department in, these are the sorts of things they're going to notice and ask you to please take care of. They're not going to give you a citation. They're not going to shut you down. But for them, it's a matter of life and death. For you, it's just space. So having some respect for that would be really nice. Outside, we can really do a lot of things. First of all, we want to keep control of our landscaping. Not only does it prevent wildfires from getting too close to our building, obviously the building on the left here is not in a wildfire zone, or it still wouldn't be around probably. But we also want to keep our landscaping under control because a lot of time what's going to happen is it's going to obstruct the fire department access points. So your building somewhere on the outside has fire department access points. And this is where they can hook up their trucks to the sprinkler system. If your sprinkler system needs more water or the pressure isn't high enough, it's a way for them to access all sorts of things. So you need to keep those access points clear. And a lot of times what happens is it gets obscured by shrubbery or growing ivy or things like that. And the harder you make it for your fire department to get to those access points, the longer it takes for them to fight the fire. This includes making sure that there's a path shoveled to those access points in the winter. And speaking of winter and shoveling, if you have emergency exits, all of those emergency exits need to be shoveled out. And the path needs to not only be just the little platform outside the door, but the path needs to lead to a parking lot or a road. And that is because if you're somebody in a wheelchair and you wheel yourself out in the winter and you're only getting a foot from the building, that's not going to help you much. So you need to be able to clear that access all the way to a point where a vehicle can get to you in order to really be on the right side of the fire department. Because again, the more that you can do to reduce their need to focus on life safety, the more they're going to be able to fight the fire and preserve your building and your collections. So accessibility is a really important thing. And it's actually one of the things that the fire department would tell you has to be done, especially if you've got clutter and fire exits that don't go anywhere. So just be aware of that. I'm going to do a little side note here on Woodbark Mulch. I couldn't find a good picture, so forgive this kind of feeble image, but it's the back side of my house where I have Jack in the Pulp, it's growing, and it was the best image I could get to illustrate what I'm trying to talk about. So first of all, we know those of you in wildfire areas are very aware that Woodbark Mulch is not what you want, you want to gravel, because of course Woodbark Mulch is wood, and it would easily catch fire. For those of us not in wildfire areas, we still want to be very conscious of how we are using Woodbark Mulch. First of all, you don't want it to be too close to the sill of your building, A, because it holds moisture and it can rot your building, but also if for some reason I was having a fire on my back patio, which is this side of the house, and the stray ember got away and it was really dry out and it started a fire in the Woodbark Mulch here. Remember our fire spread? It's going to spread up and out, so what's going to happen is it's going to come up under the sill of the building, get into the walls, and the fire is going to spread very rapidly into my house. So you want to make sure that you have got good, clear space between your mulch and the sill of your building to prevent the fire from coming up into the building. So no matter where you are, be thoughtful about your use of Woodbark Mulch. And yes, do as I say, not as I do. Okay, so I can't remember what year this was. A couple of years ago when there were lots of, one of the wildfires was getting very close to the Getty Center. The New York Times did a great article on just how the Getty has landscaped to reduce the effects of a wildfire. And I have shared this article with you. It's in the handout. It's just, it's a really interesting read, but it just goes to show what you can do with a lot of money and, you know, if you're building, you're building from scratch. And so, you know, the building materials they used were very much fire resistant. They used crushed stone on the roof as a roofing material. You know, those of us who live in areas where cedar shakes are really popular, you won't see those out in California. Those houses don't exist anymore. Oak trees are regularly pruned, so you're making sure that you're reducing that fire load and making sure that, you know, the canopies are high off the ground. You don't have any low hanging branches that could catch much more easily. They use the acacia shrubs because they are fire resistant and can hold plenty of water. Water cools a fire, so that's going to help. The thing that impresses me is the 1 million gallon water tank. That's a lot of water. So if they need it, they've got the water. And then the irrigation pipes, which is just a, you know, use your irrigation sprinklers to help reduce fires. It's just a great, great example of, you know, fire preparation on a grand scale. But there are elements here that we can all learn from and use for our own institutions, even if we don't have a lot of money. So finally, I think the best thing that you can do is prepare. So, Mike, if you want to pull up the last poll for me, I'm just really curious to know how many of you have an up-to-date disaster plan. Up-to-date is, you know, within the last couple of years. If you have a 10-year-old disaster plan, that doesn't count as up-to-date. Because the better prepared that we can be, the more information that we have, the better off we're all going to be. So it may seem like a pain sometimes, but it really is an important thing to do. And if you don't have the time or the wherewithal to do a full, blown-up big, giant plan, the Council of State Archivists has a pocket response plan. And I think somebody might have mentioned it in the chat a while ago. But the pocket response plan is fabulous. It's a single 8-and-a-half by 14 sheet of paper. It folds up. If you follow the lines, it folds up to the size of a credit card and you can carry it in your wallet. You never have to wonder where your disaster plan is. So, well, it's great to see that the vast majority of you have one or it's in development. For those of you still in development, I hope this webinar has spurred you on to really want to get in there and finish the plan. Okay. Thank you, Mike. Hopefully, our plans are a little more intricate than yelling duck, but you never know. So, I'm going to go to the questions. I'm going to go to the questions. Okay. And I'll read them for you. I also want to remind people that to fill up the evaluations are really important for us. Okay. Priya Lewis in Washington says, I would be interested to see how firefighters deal with fires in buildings that have underground layers. Yeah, that is really hard for them because, of course, fires spread up. So, essentially what they do is they take the same approach, they take a deluge approach. So, they just dump water in. So, what they might do is they may cut holes in floors and just start dumping water in to start cooling it down so that they can then get down to those levels and fight the fires. But it is probably one of the hardest things for them to fight because the life safety issues for the firefighters themselves are so complicated. Elizabeth, Cesar says, what's your sense of firefighter turnover? How often should we be repeating tours? I, in my experience working with the firefighters in Massachusetts, they are an incredibly dedicated bunch. So, I would say once a year is good to just have them in even if it's just for a special firefighters afternoon or something. Just to keep that relationship going, even if there isn't anybody new, where you really run into firefighter turnover is when you are dealing with an all-volunteer run, a volunteer fire department. They're going to have people cycling in and out much more frequently. But you will get new firefighters coming in as older firefighters either move up into leadership positions or transition to being educators or investigators because there is definitely an age limit. Do you determine the carcinogenic DOC quantitatively after the fire incident and carbon microparticle as well? One of the things when I actually do live burn and salvage exercises is recommend that people take soot samples and send them to an industrial hygienist for testing. Because you want to know what's in your soot because it could be carcinogenic, especially if you're responding to the disaster in-house. In all honesty, I'd hire a vendor to come in and do it for you. And then they would do that too so they know about the safety issues. And what method is preferable to remove soot from the wall that were not damaged by fire? And there's been quite a bit of discussion about using, what is it, absorbing? Yeah, soot sponges. Soot sponges are great. Yeah. They're a first line. So you're going to go in and that's what you're going to take the bulk of the soot off with. But then you still need to do some cleanup after that. And a lot of what you do after that is going to depend on what's in the soot. Because you don't want to be washing it and sending all of that down the drain. So if you actually were in a building that still had asbestos, it's one of the things you're not going to be doing alone. So you're doing yourself. You're going to be having somebody come in and do it for you. Because your health and your life is much more important than saving a couple of dollars, in my honest opinion. Amy Sanderson says, I agree with you. Amy Sanderson says, would the wood bark mulch be still a concern for a brick building? Yes, you still have a sill in your brick building. So unless you have no foundation and your building just goes straight from the basement up with no sill, then you wouldn't need to worry about it. I don't know of any building constructed like that. So you're always going to have a sill, essentially, where the foundation ends and the building itself begins. And so you're going to still want to be thinking about keeping the wood bark mulch down below that sill line. Or using, you know, gravel. OK. So if you use gravel, you don't have to worry about it. I think we're done. That's right. I think we're done. I will add a few things to the handout. Yeah, that would be great. I'll add the National Heritage Respond Respond Number. There's a nice resource on removal maps for fire things where you make a map and it tells the fireman what needs to be taken out and how to take it out. I will link that in. And I'll add the library book. And, oh yeah, it's really good. The Heritage People in England have a very good website on fire. Maybe I'll add that too. OK. And so our next free webinar is in...