It’s a horrific loss to cultural heritage whenever an iconic structure and its precious contents go up in smoke, like the recent Notre Dame fire in Paris. Notre Dame isn’t just an old historic building, a symbol of the City of Light. It held a collection of some of Europe’s most important Gothic and Renaissance art works, and unlike replaceable (albeit not original) architectural features, a number of those art works are now gone forever.
The lesson reaches far beyond libraries, museums, and other cultural repositories, however. Disasters, whether fire- or weather-related, almost never allow time for the protection of essential items, whether they’re works of art or vital business documents. Notre Dame reminds us that, no matter what sort of organization you’re operating, disaster planning makes survival and recovery possible.
A key element of disaster planning for any enterprise is deciding in advance what documents and other media must be protected, and how best to protect them. Fireproof files are one way to preserve paper documents, tape, and film. These insulated cabinets protect contents from temperatures up to 1700 degrees, for up to 3 hours. If the floor burns away, fireproof files can withstand a drop of up to 30 feet without damage to the contents, and during clean-up, their locking mechanisms prevent unauthorized access.
Document conversion (digitizing) or digitization is another way to guard against the loss of important media. For paper documents in particular, conversion offers multiple benefits. These processes create digital versions of your original paper documents, suitable for cloud storage, physical drives, or both. Regulated industries are especially concerned about the loss of paper documents, putting organizations in a non-compliant situation with no way to recover missing records. With important documents safely stored on remote servers, compliance is ensured even when offices are destroyed.
Fires strike more than 3,000 U.S. offices per year, with fire and sprinkler damage amounting to $112 million annually. FEMA estimates that 40% of businesses never re-open after a disaster. With so much at stake, it’s just good business sense to plan for a worst-case scenario, then put safe, secure storage between you and disaster.
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The recent devastating fire in the National Museum of Brazil reminds everyone in the museum realm that disasters can strike any time. Fire, flood, climate, earthquakes – the potential for damage and loss takes many forms, and no museum is invulnerable. The Association of Art Museum Directors reported over 13 million art objects in museums in 2015, a figure that doesn’t include historic artifacts, science and technology collections, and exceptional cultural items. Since that time, collections have only grown larger. With such a quantity of unique and priceless objects at stake, museum designers are looking for new ways to protect their collections from natural disasters.
In the Netherlands, for example, Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is filled with Old Masters, and like most of the city, it’s below sea level. In the past 14 years the museum has been threatened with flooding five times. As reported in the Washington Post, construction is underway on an above-ground flood-proof storage facility designed to keep the Boijmans’ collections out of harm’s way.
In Los Angeles, wildfires and earthquakes are a way of life. The Getty Museum was designed with fire-proofing features from the very start; the exterior is stone clad, and the surrounding grounds can be soaked with an irrigation system if fire threatens. If the ground begins to shake, ingenious stabilized display cases keep art and artifacts safe in this earthquake-prone zone.
The Louvre is in danger of flooding, as we discussed in a previous post, and many of its treasures are stored in structurally-unsound old Parisian buildings. The museum broke ground in late 2017 on a state-of-the-art storage and restoration facility, partially underground, which uses thermal mass (the surrounding soil) to maintain a stable indoor climate. The site incorporates a water management system which recycles water for the exterior landscape and also guards against flooding.
Like fire suppression and climate control, storage is part of the museum-safety picture. Fire-proof cabinets protect flammable documents, and multi-level storage elevates collections away from flood danger. Art racks and flat drawers bring space-efficient storage to climate-controlled areas. In the event that collections have to be evacuated, RFID tracks the whereabouts of each inventoried object.
Designers are taking their cue from the Getty, the Louvre, and others, incorporating these innovative storage systems into new construction and retrofits as part of a complete disaster-mitigation strategy. Their hope, and ours too, is that disasters can be a thing of the past in the museums of tomorrow.
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Irma, Harvey, Katrina, Sandy – these are names which remind us that natural disasters are devastating, not just for private citizens but for the businesses that serve those affected communities. Business continuity and disaster recovery are important considerations in any successful business, but our American “can-do” optimism can often lead us to overlook the need to plan for disaster. Any well-run business carries insurance, but beyond paying a premium, there are other ways to mitigate the effects of a natural disaster so you can carry on business afterwards.
Disaster recovery is most often associated with IT, but it also applies to facilities management, logistics, HR – every facet of a business. A disaster recovery plan is a subset of a business continuity plan, which is itself a proactive approach to maintaining smooth operations in the face of the unexpected – for example, having a backup generator in case of a sudden loss of power. Disaster recovery is reactive, taking action after the fact – i.e., switching on the generator when you lose power.
Your choice of storage system can have a significant impact on your business continuity and disaster recovery plan:
- Data and records storage – Can essential paper documents and backup drives be retrieved and moved to safety? Who will execute that task, and how?
- Inventory management – Are inventory records accurate, for insurance claims? Do you have an automated system that keeps inventory records up to date?
- Logistics – How is the supply chain likely to be affected? Do you have a space-efficient storage system that lets you increase capacity in the safe zone?
Texas supermarket chain H-E-B put their disaster recovery plan into immediate action in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. H-E-B president Scott McClelland, a veteran of Gulf Coast disasters, kept 70% of H-E-B’s stores open and stocked in the immediate aftermath of record floods. It was a remarkable achievement, but it was no accident that H-E-B was well prepared, as McClelland relates in an interview with LinkedIn’s Chip Cutter. H-E-B’s disaster recovery plan included the establishment of command centers in unaffected areas, and coordinating with suppliers to stockpile essential items prior to the storm.
H-E-B’s proactive approach to a catastrophic event let them keep their doors open to continue serving the community. Storing stockpiled inventory was part of that plan. When you’re considering your organization’s storage needs, it’s wise to include your own business continuity and disaster recovery plan in your storage system choices.
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