I heard someone once say that if you aren’t able to provide a definition of something then you don’t really know what it is. Whether true or not, I remembered this statement when asking myself, "what is an emergency?"
I was preparing to teach my first salvage training course for the property team at Mottisfont. Starting simple, I wanted to begin the presentation with this question. However, at that moment I found myself unable to define it. So I turned to the dictionary for some guidance.
An emergency, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action.”
There are many different types of emergencies – medical, environmental, financial, and even cultural. According to a survey carried out between 2005 and 2006, 30% of museums in the UK had experienced an emergency or disaster in the past five years and 21% had experienced more than one. (Introduction to Emergency Planning (2011-2012))
The types of incidents ranged from fire, vandalism, power outages, and most frequently, water damage (at a historic property such as Mottisfont, water damage can be the result of burst pipes, a burst radiator, snow melt, rain, and more).
Unfortunately, it was also reported that between 2002 and 2006, an average of seven heritage buildings in the UK were lost or damaged each month due to fire (The Cost of History, Fire Risk Management Journal cited in Butler, P., Herrick, J., Hunt, N., Aspiration. Heritage Supplement, 1st Edition, 4).
So how do we avoid adding to the above statistics? We plan.
In order to mitigate loss in the event of an emergency or disaster, our staff have come up with salvage and recovery procedures to help us feel confident and prepared if such an event occurred.