Wednesday 18 December 2019

Bushfire planning

[This post is about bushfire planning for small museums. I've been getting some hits from people looking for help getting their bushfire plan together. If you've come here looking for general information check the relevant CFA or RFS pages.]

It's hardly the most festive of topics, but with the ongoing bushfire emergency on the east coast the time has come to update our disaster planning.

We've over four thousand artefacts - I'm not entirely sure how many, I havn't finished documenting the collection yet - so any evacuation would mean taking only the highlights.

It's a pity, but in an emergency we would have to abandon most of the collection to its fate.

I tried looking on the web for any useful examples of disaster planning for small museums or historic buildings but did not find any relevant examples, so I wrote my own based on my past experience of writing disaster plans as to what to do with archival computer tapes. (Since the recent bushfires more resources have become available online - see the Blue Shield resources page)

It's pretty minimal at the moment, and in no way an official document, but I've placed a redacted copy online to help anyone putting together a similar plan against a deadline.

As the document evolves and changes I'll put the changes into the redacted version as well.

Please feel free to copy, download or modify the plan - the redacted version is a Google Document and can be downloaded here.

If you do find it useful, please let me know how you've used it and what changes you've made - you can find my contact details online if you don't know them already - in fact if you end up using the plan, send me a postcard from your museum/historic house.

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