Fire Prevention Efforts Paid Off at Getty Museum

They take fire prevention extremely seriously at the J. Paul Getty Museum's two campuses in Los Angeles, and those efforts paid off last week when the Palisades fire came within 6 feet of the Getty Villa's eastern wall. The museum—and its 40,000 antiquities—remained intact, though acres of its terrain were burnt. As the fires continue to rage, around 45 museum workers have been patrolling the grounds of the Getty Villa and the newer Getty Center in the Brentwood district, searching the grounds and the canopies of trees for embers, the Wall Street Journal reports. "We're holding up well, but it's been totally wild," Getty Trust president and chief executive Katherine Fleming tells the Journal.

"Within fewer than 10 minutes of the fire breaking out, we had changed the air handling system so that no smoke would get into the galleries," Fleming tells Reuters. She was in a command center at the other museum as fire raced toward the Getty Villa Tuesday night. "We could see the fire and we'd tell them about flare-ups, and then we'd see them leave the building to go fight it," she says. "That was frightening." She tells the Los Angeles Times that one of the scariest moments came when a plant bed filled with rosemary burst into flames, but "lo and behold, just like if you sprinkle a bunch of rosemary on a pizza and put it under the broiler and it crackles and sparkles, and then very rapidly goes out."

The Getty Villa, which opened in 1974, was built to be fire-resistant, as was the Getty Center, which opened in 1997. The center is clad in 1.2 million square feet of stone. The landscaping at both sites was also designed to minimize the risk from wildfires. The villa has a 50,000-gallon water tank that can feed a sprinkler system and the center has a million-gallon tank. The center was in an evacuation zone Friday but fire didn't reach the grounds. Fleming says it would have been "extremely foolish" to try to move the center's priceless paintings to another location. "We have taken such care to make sure that the galleries themselves are actually pretty much the safest place for a work of art to be in the middle of a fire," Fleming says. (More California wildfires stories.)