When Things Get Tough

New Strategies for Cultural Heritage Crisis Management in Post-Disaster Areas

by Alessandro Califano1

When the city of L'Aquila and a large part of the Abruzzi region in Italy were devastated by an earthquake in the night of 6 April 2009, ICOM Italy quickly wrote out a call to its members, contacted volunteer associations, and set up the Cultural Heritage High Risks Commission in a matter of days.

Things were made difficult by both the mountainous environment – in some isolated villages people have been left unattended, corpses not disposed of, for days – and a strict militarization of operations, managed by that very same National Civil Service for Emergencies (Protezione Civile) whose experts have been later on found guilty of privately rejoicing for, and profiting from, the many-sided business opportunities given to them by the disaster.

Nevertheless, in but a few weeks the Commission succeeded in giving assistance to local cultural heritage institutions in a quite effective way, in synergy with local administrations, the fire brigades, a large association of volunteers (Legambiente), and ICOM Italy's museum professionals. An excellent restoration centre for taking care of immediate needs was set up in the relatively safe museum of Celano, built in the Eighties in the Fucine plain, and starting from early summer, the centre hosted residential hands-on workshops, with conservations experts coming from different institutions and countries.

This model proved however utterly useless in the aftermath of the new earthquake that hit the Emilia-Romagna region in May 2012. No direct actions were undertaken by the Commission, and a more or less scanty rescue of museum artefacts and the historical building hosting them was undertaken by fire and emergency rescue brigades, in the frame of regional administrations. For weeks, even trying to obtain a list of what had been damaged, and to what degree, seemed to be a difficult thing to ask, even more,to achieve.

In order to manage similar crises in an earthquake, inundation, and landslide-prone country such as Italy, a different approach and new strategies have to be devised. Instead of relying too much on routine-loving regional administrative institutions, advanced technologies and local intelligence should be brought into focus.

From this point of view, an excellent public information work has been done in the post-disaster area by – even very tiny – local audio broadcasting stations. These have been delivering vital information to locals, ranging from safe areas where to camp, to sites and times of bread and water distributions.

1 Alessandro Califano, Ph.D. in Oriental Studies, a member of the Canadian Museums Association, ICOM, and ICOMOS UK, is Senior Curator at CRDAV, the City of Rome's Visual Arts Research & Documentation Centre and a free-lance Cultural Consultant for UNESCO in Central Asia since 2008, mostly involved in risk assessment and collection management programmes. He is a member of the Cultural Heritage High Risks Commission in Italy since April 2009. He can be reached at califano.a [at] mclink.it

Having a current list of local audio and video broadcasting stations on a regional level would be a fundamental task to go after. Another crucial stakeholder, in the immediate aftermath of the Emilian earthquake has been Hackathon Terremoto, an open group of ICT people quickly working on open software platforms to deliver useful tools to be applied in the disaster hit area by common people, also to keep track of events and give immediately usable feedback regarding damages and risks. Hackathon started delivering detailed informations and full FOSS tools less than two weeks after the earthquake had hit the region.

Assembling a detailed knowledge-base about such freely available resources, fostering capacity building training on smart-phone applications relevant to risk and emergency situations, and strongly encouraging contributions to Google's visual documentation of georeferenced monuments and cultural heritage institutions seems to have a much greater potential for effectively tackling post-disaster events, reducing to a minimum the consequences of such events on cultural heritage. Thus, it is on these tasks that the Cultural Heritage High Risks Commission should focus, in order to reformulate its strategy to manage potentially devastating risk situations.

Useful links:

• http://www.slideshare.net/califano/the-cultural-heritage-high-risks-commission-3021599

• http://museumstudies.tumblr.com/post/24395793190/cultural-heritage-in-danger-update-from- the

• http://museumstudies.tumblr.com/post/25275062691/post-disaster-failures-in-italys-2012-quake

• http://hackathonterremoto.wordpress.com/about/

• http://brainstormingterremoto.ideascale.com/

[ Rome, 2 November 2012 ]