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    What It's Like to Evacuate a Museum in a Natural Disaster

    One hour, dozens of artifacts, and looters—a drill at the Smithsonian teaches museums how to plan for the worst.
    by Sarah Zhang Dec 14, 2017 5 minutes
    Source: Chip Somodevilla / Getty

    The journalist was not having it. He tailed the museum director out the door. “Are you looting the museum for your own personal means?” he demanded. “I totally saw you slip something into your car earlier today.”

    Obviously, the emergency evacuation of the state museum of “Smithsonia” was not going according to plan.

    This scene played out at the Smithsonian on a recent Wednesday afternoon, during an exercise in which a group of cultural-heritage professionals and emergency responders tried to evacuate the fictional Smithsonia museum after a pretend cyclone. They had all come to Washington, D.C., for the weeklong Heritage Emergency and Response Training, or HEART, hoping to learn how museums can plan for natural disasters or even war.

    The HEART organizers did not make it easy: The museum’s collection was scattered and uncatalogued, the staff were largely absent, the aforementioned reporter was

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