The Getty in Los Angeles was spared from the flames, a firefighting lesson for Americans

On the Pacific Palisades devastated by the fires, a building stands miraculously intact: it is Villa Getty, which survived the siege of the flames as did the J. Paul Getty Museum, not far away. They are not a beacon of hope for a community that must rise – literally – from its ashes, but also a model of how to do things so that the disaster of the last week is not repeated at the next fire on a windy day.

A small army of 45 museum employees has been mobilized on 24-hour shifts to patrol the dozens of acres on the hills surrounding the Getty’s two campuses: the old Getty Villa in the Pacific Palisades, where classical antiquities exhibited in a space designed to evoke a house in imperial Rome, and the most recent Getty Center in white stone in Brentwood, where Vincent van Gogh’s “Irises” are exhibited.

The Getty’s survival against all odds – the flames came within two meters of the mansion’s eastern walls – became one of the few moments of joy in the midst of a cataclysm. The country’s richest museum has both the experience and resources to respond successfully: It has an endowment of $9.1 billion and has also dealt with forest fires previously in 2009 and 2017. In the meantime, it has spent millions on over the years to strengthen its architecture, add fire prevention mechanisms in the rooms and prepare the surrounding terrain for the worst. “We’re holding up well, but it’s been crazy,” Katherine Fleming, president and CEO of the Getty Trust, told the Wall Street Journal.

The worst of the crisis occurred already on the first night of the fire, while Fleming watched the Palisades flames rise out of control towards the villa from the command station of the Getty Center. A forest fire tracking app showed the mansion surrounded in red. The members of his staff inside the villa were trapped but safe: when the villa opened in 1974, it had fireproof concrete walls and tiled roofs. There is also an elaborate irrigation system on site.

The next day the scene was surreal: hectares of land around the villa were reduced to a scorched bald patch dotted with charred trees, while the internal gardens were still cheerfully green. The collection of 40,000 antiquities was intact. Three days later, another evacuation order arrived, this time for the Getty Center located a few kilometers to the northeast, where the Brentwood fire was raging. Architect Richard Meier designed the center to never burn.

The walls are covered with almost 400 thousand square meters of travertine stone cream colored and surrounded by large open spaces which make the spread of fire more difficult. Further afield, the museum grounds are dotted with acacia shrubs and oaks, which absorb far more water than other green plants and are less likely to burn like firewood. The low branches of the trees are continually pruned and cleaned.

All these choices were made intentionally to make it more difficult for flames to attack the structure. Since the museum opened in 1997, Rogers said, gardeners have taken advantage of the site’s complex network of sprinklers to water the grass whenever there is a forest fire warning. The sprinklers are connected to municipal water lines but can be fed from the center’s 4 million liter water tank if necessary and from another 200,000 liter water tank in the villa.