MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The Palisades fire has spread to the grounds of the Getty Villa. The museum holds more than 44,000 antiquities from ancient Greece and Rome. Trees and vegetation on the property have burned, but the museum's structures and its collection are safe and intact. That's according to our next guest, Katherine Fleming. She is the president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which operates the museum. Thank you so much for joining us, Ms. Fleming.
KATHERINE FLEMING: Good morning. Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: Can you just tell us a little bit more about what is happening around the villa this morning?
FLEMING: Well, what is happening around the villa is still an active fire zone. As you've just heard, there are very strong and unpredictable winds - largely offshore winds today - that are making this an ongoing crisis. The Palisades fire, within which the Getty Villa is found, has grown over the course of the night, moved further north and further east. But at the Getty Villa itself, all of the stuff on the ground that was going to burn has burned. And thankfully, because we had been planning for an event of this sort, but certainly not of these proportions - we'd been planning for a long time. A lot of the brush had already been cleared out over the course of the past year before the fire arrived. So at the villa itself, we have staff. We have great staff on site keeping an eye out, but things have largely calmed down for us there.
MARTIN: Well, that's good to hear. Can you just say more about how? What kind of planning went into this and protecting the museum's structures and the items in the collection? And I also, of course, do want to know how you're keeping the staff safe.
FLEMING: So, yeah, the staff obviously are the No. 1 priority. The Getty, for anyone who knows it, has a super strong culture of safety. It's really safety obsessed, and also is acutely aware of the fact that it's a repository for a global cultural heritage that we hold sort of on behalf of the world. So we are constantly in all sorts of ways, not just in terms of fires, running all kinds of exercises to make sure that we have systems in place to protect people and to protect the collection.
In the case of fires, what we have done is just constant and really extensive brush clearance around all of our buildings, done all sorts of improvements. We do what's called fuel reduction. So you prune and you thin the trees. You do everything you can to lift - raise the tree canopies up from the ground. I mean, none of it's sexy, but it's all super important at a moment like this. You thin out low-level plant materials to reduce the mass. And that really helps to reduce the fire load and, you know, takes a lot of the velocity out of the fire as it comes through. People - yeah, go ahead.
MARTIN: I was going to say that, you know, the Getty Center in Brentwood temporarily closed in 2017 and 2019 due to fires burning nearby. Did you learn some lessons from that?
FLEMING: Well, absolutely. I mean, you know, I think all of us together are learning that urban centers are not immune from this, especially in a geography like Los Angeles' where the urban center includes forest. It includes open land, and it includes very, very dry mountainsides. So, yes, absolutely. Next time you're up at the center, you can look around, and you'll see there are no plants anywhere, really, near the buildings. And that's precisely because of this.
MARTIN: It's like the very things that make it such a gorgeous area to live in are the very things that make it so dangerous right now. Do you have any evacuation plans in place for any particular items?
FLEMING: No, we would not be evacuating items. We have designed our sites to make sure that items would - probably the safest place for the items to be in an event like this, wild as it sounds, is to be at one of our sites. It would be a pretty bad move to try and evacuate anything during an event of this sort. You know, up at the villa itself, the buildings are of super high-rated fire resistive construction. We've got double-walled structures. There's really, really significant protection for the galleries kind of hardwired into the design of the buildings.
MARTIN: So that's good to hear. Before we let you go, do you mind if I ask how are you doing?
FLEMING: I'm OK. I'm way, way more OK than lots and lots of people in this city are. I have a home, thank God. And where I am at the base of the hill of the Getty Center, it smells like smoke, but I can breathe pretty easily. So really, our No. 1 concern right now is for all of the people who aren't doing anywhere near as well as I am. But thank you for asking.
MARTIN: That is Katherine Fleming. She's president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Thank you so much for talking to us. And we're going to keep a good thought for you and for everybody else who's affected by this, and of course, for the collection.
FLEMING: Thanks very much. Appreciate it. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
