Preparing for Extreme Weather: Fire and Hurricane

The past few years have seen an increase in cultural institutions dealing with various extreme disasters. In this webinar we will feature two examples of extreme weather, wildfires and hurricanes, and how staff at two institutions dealt with preparation, impact, and ramifications for these common types of extreme weather.

CZU Lightening Fires of San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties, California August 2020
Speakers: Kathleen Aston, Collections Manager, Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History
Jenny Daly, Museum Curator I, California State Parks

In this portion of the webinar Kathleen Aston Collections Manager at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History will discuss emergency plan writing and incorporating lived experiences into emergency plan improvements, including the importance of the priority object designations, chain of command for decision making, evacuation plans, and staff training as well as community oriented disaster responses including community collections, programming, and partnerships related to disasters.

Her collaborator, Jenny Daly, Museum Curator for the Santa Cruz District of California State Parks, will describe how the state parks responded to the fire including: a timeline of evacuations, lessons learned, and coordinating the return of evacuated collections after the fire.

The Always Existing Hurricane Season
Speaker: Chakira Teresa Santiago, Museum Collection Manager, Museum of History, Anthology and Art University of Puerto Rico/Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte Universidad de Puerto Rico

For this next section Chakira Teresa Santiago, Museum Collection Manager, Museum of History, Anthology and Art University of Puerto Rico/Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte Universidad de Puerto Rico will present an overwhelming (but amazingly simple) summary of effective strategies, important documentation, low budget preparation that have been used for some of the small and mid-size museums on the island of Puerto Rico.

Presenters

Kathleen Aston, Collections Manager, Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History is the Collections Manager at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. She holds a Master’s of Library and Information Science from the University of Washington, with professional experience in natural history collections, public libraries, community archives and oral history projects. Kathleen is fascinated by the informational life of objects, and how individuals and communities use these collective memory resources to create knowledge and develop beliefs about the world around them. She is especially interested in how people use collections and collecting to develop relationships with an increasingly unstable natural world.

Jenny Daly, Museum Curator I for California State Parks in the Santa Cruz District, grew up in Santa Cruz and is fortunate to live and work in her hometown. After transferring to UC Berkeley from Cabrillo College, Jenny received a double BA in Near Eastern Studies and Theater, Performance, and Dance Studies in 2003. The most valuable part of her time at Berkeley was the internship she had working with the Registrar at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology where she became hooked on the idea of a career working in museums. Jenny then received a Master’s in Museum Studies from John F. Kennedy University in 2010 and has worked in collections management at various institutions since then, including the Getty Center in LA, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, the Computer History Museum, the California Academy of Sciences, and now at California State Parks since 2019. Jenny loves working for State Parks as a Curator because it means she can combine her love of Parks with her expertise in museum collections management.

Chakira Teresa Santiago is the Museum Collection Manager at the Museum of History, Anthology and Art at the University of Puerto Rico. In her 18 years of experience in the museum world has been a professor of Museum Studies Master, especially Museum Collection, also as a Museum Registrar have gain knowledge in Preventive Conservation, Collections documentation, museum cataloging and by trade Emergency and Disaster Training, with the Heritage Emergency Rescue Training by the Smithsonian Institution; resulting in one of the founding members of the Alliance pf Cultural Emergency of Puerto Rico since 2019. Chakira has a BA in Art History and Fine Arts and a master’s in arts administration.