 Alliances for Response
Preparedness & Mitigation
Response & Salvage
Case Studies
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Emergency Preparedness and Salvage
in the Event of Armed Conflict
Catherine Sease
Peabody Museum of Natural History
Yale University
ABSTRACT
In October 2003 the US State Department sent four museum professionals to Baghdad to assess the conditions
of the Iraqi Museum and make recommendations about what needed to be put in place in order to get the museum
functioning after the war. As the only collections person on this team, I saw first hand the effects of the war
on the collections in the museum. This paper will discuss what precautions the museum staff were able to
implement to protect the collections and assess their effectiveness. It will also discuss how the war affected
staff morale and the role this, in turn, had on the safety of the collections. The paper will then look at the
broader issues of how museums can, or cannot, be protected against armed conflict, using examples in Beirut,
Kuwait and Afghanistan as well as Iraq.
DOCUMENTS
Emergency Preparedness and Salvage in the Event of Armed Conflict
PDF of entire lecture
References
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