Ten years ago, Kobe Japan suffered a 6.9 earthquake and hundreds of buildings were destroyed. In the ten years since, they have re-built 80% of those buildings, almost without exception using a new building code and providing seismic isolation and other engineering techniques to fortify them for when the next quake strikes. Japan seemed to learn a limited lesson but the same forces are at work in Japan as are at work here in the U.S. They learned to rebuild using a stricter code. Apparently they didn’t learn not to build nuclear power plants on earthquake faults or where tsunamis might strike, without building them to even stricter codes and providing fortified sea walls. In other words, they learned a very limited lesson. Their failure to respond fully to the need for better disaster management was purely economic.

Let those who are without sin cast the first stone. We also learned little. Areas with recent quake activity like San Francisco do conform to a higher building standard than cities like Memphis, which is also likely to be wiped away by a quake in the New Madrid fault and a subsequent shift in direction of the Mississippi River and the tsunami that will cause.

I have never seen, outside of California, any collection storage room in a museum that uses earthquake protection to keep items from falling off the shelves. I’ve never worked on a building with seismic isolators outside of California, even in Memphis or Hawaii, or the Mediterranean for that matter.

I have been told to sit down and shut up by architects and museum managers when I raised the issue of whether we should be providing protection against natural disasters when planning a new building. I once raised the question about the need for seismic protection in Seattle and was slapped down like a child who sassed his father.  I questioned the fact that a museum in Mississippi was being built only a couple of hundred yards from the mean tide line of the Gulf of Mexico in an area once devastated by Hurricane Camille and on land just about 20 feet above seal level. I was told to not bring this matter up again, that the architect had considered it and decided that the risk was not that great. A barge ended up on top of one of the not yet finished buildings at that site during Katrina, which sort of made my point. I can give other examples of recommendations made and rejected at many other institutions during my career involving over 800 client facilities, because we haven’t learned.

Glass buildings built in Miami without hurricane glass, museums built on the seawall in hurricane country, buildings with underground parking garages in areas where underground parking garages regularly flood, museums built on the forest edge with no fire buffer in areas of regular wildfires, and collection storage rooms in the basement, below sea level, on coastal museums are just a few more examples of how we didn’t learn a thing. We won’t even talk about how many simple and inexpensive countermeasures to terrorism I’ve made and had rejected.

I’m frequently told that I am the security consultant on the project and that worrying about disasters is none of my concern. I disagree. We are “protection consultants’, responsible for advising museums and their architects on how to protect the building, its collections and staff from a variety of risks. Unfortunately, I have to limit my scope of work to what the client wants.

I understand the economic reasons why architects and museum operators are reluctant to want to know the truth about many things. I’ve never yet seen a museum that was built on budget. Some claim to have been but hidden costs and deferred features were the only reason they can claim to have been on budget. No one wants to spend money on seismic protection or seawalls when it can be better spent on marble walls and imported Italian door hardware and when they know that cost overruns will occur. And museum operators who own, or can get a piece of land for a bargain, could sometimes care less about some future possible disaster, because they need that new facility now and won’t get it if they can’t use the land they have to work with.

When a corporation donates a piece of land to you as a tax write off for use as your new museum, it often pays to look that gift horse directly in the mouth to see if it was once a toxic waste dump (I know one museum that planned a facility on one), is in a flood zone, is in a hurricane surge tide area, or has some other risk potential that the corporation’s risk managers chose not to deal with and generously donated to the local museum so they could recover their losses at the expense of the taxpayers.

America suffers from a serious inability to learn from the mistakes of others. Heck, we don’t even learn from our own mistakes. After 9/11 many New York museums laid off guards to compensate for the revenue shortfall so they could retain everyone else. This may seem like a good business decision until you realize that you can lay off five assistant department heads and function with near normal efficiency but for the same savings would have to lay off ten or more guards and incur great risk.

Did you know that the U.S. has one nuclear power plant that sits on the coast and is right on top of four faults? Diablo Canyon was built to withstand a 7.5 quake. An 8.5 earthquake (Japan suffered an 8.9) is ten times greater than a 7.5 quake. Ten times! By the way. It’s the same design as the one currently nearing meltdown in Japan.

You and I can’t control how a nuclear power plant is built. Getting the government to side with the people on issues like this and not with corporations is a subject for a different editorial. Getting architects to take seriously the concept that their beautiful building isn’t anything but a pile of junk or an eyesore if they don’t build it to last is a topic for the AIA and our esteemed architectural schools to address. But getting museum operators to understand that if their collection is forever destroyed by a natural disaster that they should have foreseen and addressed, their name will indeed be synonymous with Mudd—Dr. Mudd, that is.

I’ve said many times that the function of museum protection management is not economy and efficiency. If it is, we would send all of the guards home and buy more insurance to cover our losses. We have a greater responsibility and sometimes we have to spend some money to do our jobs right.

Another thing I have always said is that there is nothing better than a museum robbery or disaster at the museum next door to give us the direction, resources and motivation we need to protect our museums properly. A loss in our own museum is a great loss. A loss in a neighboring museum is a great loss also, but not one we need to deal with and one we can only benefit from.

Let’s learn from Japan. What happened there isn’t a fluke. And there are things that can be done. We just need to get our heads out of the sand and face the issue. Get out your museum’s charter and read it. I’ll bet you a glass of lemonade at the next AAM conference that your charter says something to the effect that your mission is to “preserve, protect and educate.”  Preserve and protect. I think that’s what security is all about and its more than just keeping a thief out. Meanwhile, here in the U.S. we debate whether to cut funding for our tsunami early warning system because, in spite of recent tsunami damage in California, “the need has not been proven”. God help us all.

The author has conducted security projects at three Japanese museums. The company has done emergency response to museums in the U.S. and abroad after disasters and during wars.