Additional Context: The Getty Villa which is on the border of Malibu and Pacific Palisades was the structure that was threatened by fire directly. This article is about the Getty Center which lies in Brentwood and fires did not reach it.
Center: 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90049
Villa: 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272
The reason this article is likely appearing now is because the Getty Center proper is currently in a zone which is under evacuation orders:
"The Getty Center, situated in Brentwood, draws 1.8 million visitors annually and houses hundreds of centuries-old art pieces from renowned artists such as Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Monet.
But even though as of Saturday, the center was included in a mandatory evacuation zone as a result of the Palisades Fire expansion into Brentwood, the center insisted its campus is the "safest place possible" for its massive art collection."
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/heres-how-the-getty...
This news report links the the article posted.
As of my check right now (1/12/25, noon Pacific Time), the Palisades Fire is still only 11% contained, so it's not yet over.
Oh I know, I live very close to there. I just wanted to add insight for those that might not be familiar with those being two separate things.
Will it remain the safest place if there are no people left on-site to staff the fire-protection mechanisms because of a mandatory evacuation order?
The Getty has an endowment in the billions and an entire team devoted to this that is permitted to be on site, coordinates with local fire and police services, etc. The entire center is also built into the hillside, with fireproof vaults in the underground levels, so there is no real risk to any of the collections.
If people evacuate before putting the art in the vaults, the vaults won't work. Remember the Titanic when the life boats left half full?
> The Getty has […] an entire team devoted to this that is permitted to be on site.
Yes: you can notice this, for example, in the announcements they put out while the area around the Getty Villa evacuated and then burned, where they pointed out that non-emergency staff had evacuated. Similarly, I think JPL always had (emergency) staff present, and their own firefighting resources.
Having heard about wildfire policies for some high-profile institutions in fire-prone areas, they'll often have their own procedures, in coordination with local authorities, which may not involve evacuating when others do, and may involve people coming to the site when others are evacuating.
I imagine they have a number of life-support systems to ensure the staff can hang out in the building for a while in case of a severe natural disaster.
"Yeah and what if you just forget to use your fancy equipment? Not so smart now, huh?!"
You totally showed them
An observation on how this has become extremely common nowadays.
Here, at work, in real life. People just argue with whatever dumb thing they can come up with, for the sake of arguing, it makes them feel smart. It's really hard to have a meaningful conversation with them.
I go to a couple philosophical discussion groups and the occasional town hall meeting. People just can't get their imaginary needs satisfied.
"But that area seems unsafe"
"We could hire a security guard to be around"
"But what if the security guard is a criminal, like in that one episode of muh favorite tv show"
"We could do an extensive background check, work with companies that have a good reputation, ..."
"But what if they make all that up, I saw that in a movie"
And nothing. ever. gets. done.
Btw, I've even seen people get a small round of applause by their peers after making one of such arguments irl. This comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn200lvmTZc.
Yep. The Getty Villa was threatened, and is not discussed in the linked article.
I enjoy the villa at least as much as the main center. It would be a huge loss.
Very interesting to see the thought put into it. And given the cultural and historic significance, they’re literally irreplaceable. Must be a fun exercise in incident management and prevention.
I found this interesting too - https://www.getty.edu/news/the-hidden-engineering-protecting...
An article about their approach to earthquake protection.
In both cases it looks like they’re leading these sorts of engineering developments.
Note: while this is a 2019 article, the Getty Center has not burned during the 2025 Palisades fire.
The Getty Villa was far more threatened by the Palisades Fire than the center.
No, but it's been inside the evacuation area for a while:
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0876669,-118.5930521,12z/dat...
It's also relevant because the Getty Center has been rather smug about how awesome their fire protection is.
> It's also relevant because the Getty Center has been rather smug about how awesome their fire protection is.
I think your "smug" comment is unwarranted. They put a ton of solid engineering thought, money and planning into protecting the center from fire. Nothing is 100% but I think their confidence is warranted.
Related, the Getty Villa right in the middle of the Palisades also put a lot of thought, planning and money into fire prevention, and despite being directly in the path of the Palisades firestorm, no structures on the Villa burned
They are being really smug, talking about designs and systems that mean nothing when you've got temperatures outside the building hot enough to melt aluminum engine blocks, infrared radiation intense enough to set fire to things hundreds of feet away - as well as very low oxygen and very high CO/CO2 levels along with dozens of different toxic gasses - all of which HEPA filtration won't do squat about.
A "stone facade" doesn't stop +1200 degree temperatures, especially when everything on the outside will undergo incredible thermal expansion and at the least open up gaps. Steel expands about 1-2% for just an increase to 100 degrees C. 300C means about 3-4% expansion. And then there's the huge expanses of windows which will shatter or pop out - and even if they don't, the intense IR radiation will by and large go through them.
People don't realize just how insanely hot wildfires get. Go look at the pictures of neighborhoods that have burnt- they're leveled with the exception of some chimneys, steel girders for houses that have them (most these days don't, builders have been using wood-composite beams) iron fences, car bodies. Everything else is burned or melted.
There isn't a building in the world that will stop the megawatts of heat energy per square meter wildfires can generate in IR radiation.
>They are being really smug...
Just out of sheer curiosity, I would be tremendously curious to understand what kind of personal/professional background/experience you have that would qualify you to certify their emergency systems as functionally ineffective and their messaging "smug".
Yes, wildfires get incredibly hot. But the fires essentially always travel by embers or direct contact with fire - your comments about IR radiation seem to imply that IR alone will cause ignition, which is rarely if ever the case.
Here is a story about a bunch of people who survived the Camp fire in Paradise, CA, surrounded by the raging inferno, by staying in the middle of a parking lot: https://www.firehouse.com/operations-training/wildland/news/...
It is rarely the case, indeed.
However, in incidents like e.g. the Fort McMurray fire (Alberta, 2016), this is precisely what happens. One property with a heavy fuel load fanned by strong winds (i.e. plentiful O2 supply) gets hot enough that it causes ignition in a neighboring exposure.
In Ft. McMurray, there were documented cases of an entire 4+ bedroom house being reduced to ash in roughly 5 minutes. The heat generated by that process is easily sufficient to cause ignition in buildings <typical suburban layout> apart.
Stone doesn't burn, and neither does concrete. Glass melts. Steel evidently didn't burn at the temperatures these fires got to. So it makes sense that a building made of concrete and steel with stone facades and fiberglass insulation would survive the fire, especially after clearing out and hydrating the surrounding landscape so it wouldn't have the density or flammability of a forest. The Getty Center may have gotten lucky, but they might have also earned their "luck" through investment and planning.
Everyone with a fire-hardened house should be feeling good. If all Pacific Palisades houses were fire-hardened, the fire would have burned vegetation but few houses.
Even modest fire hardening would help. If a wood-frame house burns, it is a danger to all nearby houses. Hardening reduces the chain reaction potential.
There's just not enough talk about this. This is the actual failure of government, not focusing enough on surviving fires
Curious that an oil barron set aside resources to protect his own loot from his oil profits. Yes having these holdings availible to the public is cool and helps us. I was fond of their brand as they had a large presence in South Jersey. Getty had affordable gas that seemed to burn well in my college car in the late 1980's.
I guess it is too expensive to have a fm-200 based fire suppression system? They say they have sprinklers as a last resort but I’m guessing it would destroy most of the art if you needed to use them.
Did some googling, and from what I can find, there’s one fm-200 based museum suppression system in Cincinnati - which is also the home of Proctor and Gamble, a manufacturer of Hydrofluorocarbons.
I’m guessing there’s a pretty good reason no one put these in museums/ they tried and they didn’t work.
I tend to think of property insurance companies having goals that are the most “morally aligned” with the goals of civilization.
They don’t want fires, floods, etc to happen, or they lose money. They spend a lot of money researching climate patterns and construction standards, lobby for climate policies and new building standards, etc.
I’m sure insuring a museum and the risk of a payout is a dicey endeavor. The companies insuring them have probably lit many mock-museums on fire to decide what suppression system/ designs they’ll insure
FM200 is not the only system available - Inergen, Novec 1230, CO2, etc (nobody has used Halon in ages if they can avoid it, as it's toxic.)
Gaseous fire suppression systems have numerous requirements that make them unsuited for a large publicly accessible space. There's oxygen displacement; most of them are "nontoxic" to breathe but still displace oxygen, so you have to have various measures to keep from killing people - that could range from delayed discharge up to SCBA stations (and staff training, maintenance, etc.)
The other problem is that you need sufficient concentration of the agent; the concentration varies, and some need higher concentrations (and better sealing) than others. That means quite a lot of work if the space/building wasn't built with it in mind. Even for a relatively small and simple server room, gaseous fire suppression installation is expensive and a general pain in the ass.
The systems are intended for spaces that aren't normally occupied. Vaults/storage for example, and industrial spaces (electrical substations, for example.)
I thought halon was "harmless" to people, but mixing halon with fire produces nasty poisons.
The vast majority of fire suppression events I've heard of (in a DC or similar environment) are unintentional, meaning the halon wouldn't be toxic (according to my potentially flawed memory).
Certainly, if there's been a legit fire suppression event, you wait for people with the hard-hats to clear the facility. Of course, you should do the same if there's been a no-fire suppression event, but ideally your fire suppression mechanism doesn't kill the people in the room needlessly...
In addition to other comments: there are also specialized sprinklers to minimize both the risk of inadvertent damage (they point out their sprinkler systems are dry by default, which is not typical), and to minimize damage on correct activation: eg, typical sprinklers turn on permanently, often by a vial breaking, but if I recall specialized museum/library sprinklers exist that can turn on and off depending on conditions.
Most art is sealed into covered frames. You also design fire suppression sprinklers to start in outer rooms. Smoke is a far greater danger to art in a fire.
The art at the Getty is not sealed.
That’s not really for this sort of threat. Those systems displace oxygen in a confined space and into the are intended to stop combustion originating in that space.
They may have a system like that in a vault but not for the whole facility.
Children of Men was a documentary.