When the Palisades fire swept through Los Angeles’ western hills, the Getty Villa and its collection of Greek and Roman antiquities stood directly in its path. But the building and collection survived because of substantial museum preparation.
The city occupies a unique position among art locations: an urban metropolis that meets wilderness areas where natural threats loom. In 2021, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) ranked the county as the riskiest place in the nation for natural disasters, not to mention the increased threat caused by climate change.
So how do the city’s major art museums manage? With collections valued in the billions, the possibility of a cataclysmic incident is high. Yet it is these challenges that have pushed city institutions to become innovative leaders in conservation and creating safe spaces for people and art.
“I was astounded by how many people asked, ‘Did you think about evacuating the art?’” said Katherine Fleming, president and chief executive of the J. Paul Getty Trust, in a recent telephone interview. “The danger to artwork would have risen as soon as you go about moving it. These facilities were built to keep art safe in Los Angeles and everything that comes with that.”
Yet are they prepared enough?
Fire
On Jan. 7, Les Borsay, the Getty’s emergency planning specialist, was testing the fire system at the Getty Villa, a museum in the Palisades full of ancient treasures, when Los Angeles found itself at the center of a national disaster. That morning, a text from the Getty Center, the museum’s main headquarters in Brentwood, alerted Borsay that an approaching fire storm would soon be bearing down on the museum, a replica Roman country house built by the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty that became a museum in 1974.
Borsay and about a dozen emergency staff members executed a well-rehearsed protocol: They sent nonessential staff home (and would have sent visitors home, as well, but the museum was closed), sealed the gallery doors with painter’s tape and monitored camera feeds from a conference room as flames approached.
The irrigation system, activated since the start of the red-flag warning, reduced fires on the grounds, but staff members still had to extinguish spot outbreaks while awaiting firefighters.
That night, as anxiety spread across the city and with the scope of the disaster yet to be clear, rumors circulated online that the building had been lost. The Getty confirmed on Jan. 8 that the museum and its collection had survived the night.
In the months since, green shoots have started to emerge in the hills, and save for some burned trees, singed rosemary and a slightly scorched parking structure, the Getty Villa stands robust and tranquil — a stark contrast to the nearby charcoal color palms and the burned remains of houses.
“We didn’t suffer any damage to our buildings or collections,” even as the threats multiplied, Borsay said in the museum’s marble courtyard on a recent Tuesday. He pointed to a bluff cresting into view from the courtyard. After the fires came rains, and there was a mudslide that ran into the top of the property, but the institution remained safe.
Fleming, the Getty Foundation’s chief executive, recalled how the Getty Center — home to Rembrandts, Monets and van Goghs — also came under fire threat later. She felt confident in the museums’ ability to handle disaster. “We have an almost comically well-developed culture of safety, which in normal times can feel excessive, but in a crisis, it serves us really, really well,” she said.
On both properties, the fires would have found minimal fuel to burn and both locations have water tanks. Both buildings were also built with fire in mind, constructed out of materials like stone, travertine and concrete.
Wind and Smoke
The destruction caused by the January fires was amplified by extreme winds from the Santa Anas blowing in from Southern California’s inland deserts. These winds and the Eaton fire, to the east of the city, caused black smoke to blanket Pasadena and the Los Angeles basin.
“It may not be as immediately devastating as a collection burning, but smoke and soot on artworks does damage,” said John Griswold, the head of conservation at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, which is full of old masters and works from Asia. “The museum was directly in the path of the Eaton smoke plume,” Griswold said, adding that “when it comes from urban areas, the problems become complex; they can contain lead, asbestos and other nefarious substances.”
Officials at other Los Angeles institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Broad, when asked, all cited their own protocols and a reliance on air filtration systems to help prevent smoke and pollution from entering gallery spaces. Yet as fire seasons intensify, museums such as the Norton Simon in Pasadena have had to develop extra precautions. “We’ve had to do more to control potentially vulnerable points of entry such as ventilation ducts where smoke might enter during very bad seasons,” Griswold said.
Earthquake
The disaster long feared in this region is, of course, an earthquake. The city sprawls above hundreds of fault lines, including major active ones like the San Andreas, Puente Hills and Santa Monica, but the last major temblor was the 1994 Northridge quake.
That the threat looms over the museums in Los Angeles is evidenced in how a recent crop of museum buildings are prioritizing their quake preparedness. In Exposition Park, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, founded by the filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, and scheduled to open in 2026 — sits on 281 seismic base isolators that allow it to move 42 inches in any direction. “It’s designed to move flexibly like a giant roller skate during an earthquake,” Michael Siegel, the principal architect, said in an email.
In Miracle Mile, a neighborhood in Los Angeles that contains a cluster of museums, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is nearing the completion of its David Geffen Galleries, a $750 million building that spans Wilshire Boulevard. Engineers have anchored 56 specialized seismic base isolators to its foundation, allowing controlled movement during tremors.
“We all know it’s a matter of when, not if,” said Richard Hards, a senior mount maker at the Getty. For 18 years, Hards, along with a small team, has been preparing artworks for exhibition by adding devices to pedestals, ensuring they are safe during a quake.
“Every object here is mounted and secured to be earthquake ready, from tiny glassware to bronze statues,” Hards explained in a phone interview. Usually, he would be found at the Getty’s mount-making workshops, but he has been working remotely since losing his home in the Eaton fire.
The mounts the Getty use were invented in-house, but iterations are found in the city’s major museums as well as in earthquake prone regions globally. The mount is essentially a base isolator that involves a three-layer mechanical apparatus within a display pedestal, where the bottom layer anchors to the floor while the upper layers glide on ball bearings in different directions with springs limiting and controlling movement. It all snaps into action when a tremor occurs. This engineering is all but invisible to visitors.
Earlier at the museum, Borsay had jangled some keys before opening a door. In the center of the room stood “Victorious Youth,” a Greek bronze statue dating to 300-100 B.C., which was found by a fishing trawler in the Adriatic Sea in 1964. One of the few life-size Greek bronzes to survive, it is anchored to its display, which is anchored to the floor. On the night of the fires, staff members had rushed in a humidifier before sealing the gallery doors.
“He’s survived a lot,” Borsay said of the sculpture. “When the big one hits,” he added, “that’ll be the next test.”
In May, the Getty is hosting an American Alliance of Museums event to share disaster preparedness knowledge.
“It underscored how our sector works,” said Elizabeth Merritt the founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, which helps institutions prepare for a host of challenges, including environmental ones. “We know that figuring it out individually is never effective.”
In January, as soon as the fire threat passed, Fleming drove to the Getty Villa. She was relieved that all staff members were safe, and while she had been confident in the building and the collections’ safety, she was anxious to check in on the antiquities.
“I remember seeing them, and I know they’re inanimate objects, but I thought if they could talk they’d be saying something like, ‘Calm down, everybody’s fine, we’ve been around for thousands of years, surviving all sorts of disasters,’” she said. “It was a relief to see them after a major scare.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/arts/design/museum-disaster-prep.html
