Los Angeles Getty Center’s priceless collection braces for wildfires as evacuation order expands to museum
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The Getty Center and Villa, museums that house some of the most priceless pieces of art in the Los Angeles area, remain stable as wildfires continue, a museum representative said in an update on Saturday.
The Brentwood Getty Center was put under an evacuation order on Friday, while The villa, located in the Pacific Palisades, has been in an evacuation zone for days. The Palisades fire pushed eastward on Friday, prompting officials to expand mandatory evacuation orders into an area that encompasses the center.
Both are in affluent neighborhoods that many celebrities call home. More than 35,000 people live in Brentwood and roughly 24,000 people reside in the Pacific Palisades. Vice President Kamala Harris owns a home in Brentwood with her husband, First Gentleman Doug Emhoff.
Part of the University of California, Los Angeles is also located in the area.
As of Saturday afternoon, the fire has burned more than 22,000 acres and destroyed over 5,000 structures. The cause of the blaze continues to be under investigation.
It is one of four active fires impacting the county. At least 11 people have died.
Still, the Getty structures have managed to escape the flames so far.
“It was a watchful but fortunately uneventful night up here at the Getty Center,” Katherine E Fleming, president of the J Paul Getty Trust, the organization that operates the structures, said in a statement on Saturday.
The trust’s officials were told to anticipate stronger winds later in the day. Still, Fleming ensured that the museum’s galleries “are safe and protected.”
The Getty Villa, which houses the trust’s educational center, has not been harmed, though there are a few hot spots nearby. The structure has 1 million gallons of water on-site to prevent fires from setting it ablaze.
Irrigation was immediately deployed throughout the grounds Tuesday morning.
“We continue to be acutely aware of our Getty neighbors and hope for their safety and that of the whole region,” Fleming said.
The buildings are closed to the public through at least January 16 while a small team of museum staff members will remain on-site to respond to emergencies.
The center — first opened to the public in 1997 after 14 years of construction at the cost of $1.3 billion — was designed to prevent harm from wildfires and earthquakes.
It houses more than 125,000 pieces of art and 1.4 million documents.
The artwork inside the museum’s galleries can be blocked off by vault-like double-walled construction. The buildings are made of fire-resistant stone, concrete, and protected steel.
Museum officials consider it the “safest place for art during a fire,” according to a 2019 blog post on the center’s website after a fire broke out that year engulfing over 600 acres to the north and west of the structure.
“There is no need to evacuate the art or archives because they are already in the safest place possible,” the article reads.
Among some of the museum’s best-known works are Pontormo’s Portrait of a Halberdier, Orazio Gentileschi’s Danaë, Rembrandt’s An Old Man in Military Costume, Turner’s Modern Rome, Manet’s Jeanne(Spring), and Van Gogh’s Irises.
The campus’s travertine plazas include extensive open space surrounding the buildings which can help slow down an encroaching fire. Even the center’s outdoor plants were selected with wildfires in mind and are regularly pruned to prevent them from becoming fuel for fire.
Museum employees have ways to manage smoke if a fire ignites inside the building. Fire sprinklers are located throughout but are only activated as a last-resort measure.
After the Palisades fire broke out, Getty employees cleared brush from the surrounding area as part of its fire mitigation efforts but some trees and vegetation have burned in recent days. Museum galleries and library archives were sealed off from smoke by state-of-the-art air handling systems, the trust said this week in a news release.
The Palisades fire is 11 percent contained. North and northeast winds will gradually increase and peak in strength Saturday evening and overnight, according to Cal Fire, the agency tasked with responding to wildfires.
A fire weather watch in the area is in effect through 6 p.m. Sunday. Moderate to strong Santa Ana winds are likely to return Tuesday and Wednesday, creating critical fire weather conditions, according to Cal Fire.
