Toward a National Disaster Response Protocol

Ample evidence is at hand that a national disaster response protocol is urgently needed if we are to ensure that irreplaceable cultural collections are not needlessly lost. This protocol must be able to be activated quickly to deliver appropriate assistance to affected institutions and, accordingly, be unencumbered by day-to-day bureaucracies that historically have delayed response time and increased collection damage. This essay describes two recent large institutional catastrophes as well as the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina, an unprecedented U.S. regional disaster, in an effort to underscore the importance of creating a nonprofit entity—the National Disaster Center for Cultural Property (NDC)—capable of implementing an effective response in situations where local resources and expertise are overwhelmed and cultural property is at risk.