Preparing for the Unexpected

Our friends at Quiet Valley Living Historical Farm in Stroudsburg, PA, had a scare earlier this month when a pair of Clydesdales—Gunther and Wilhelm—escaped and fell into a nearby icy lake.

CCAHA offers emergency planning services for institutions like Quiet Valley so they can be ready when the unforeseen happens. Luckily, CCAHA staff had recently worked with them on the development of an Emergency Preparedness Plan, thanks to a Preservation Assistance Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

Many common emergencies for collecting institutions are related to weather or other environmental issues, and the collections most often affected contain documents and objects. In the case of a historical farm such as Quiet Valley, however, "collections" can also include the animals that are under the organization's care.

Katherine Muller, Executive Director at Quiet Valley, reached out this week to thank CCAHA for working to develop the organization's Emergency Preparedness Plan. Though the staff is only partway through the training process, she credits the plan with helping to avert disaster.

"Our horses... are doing well and predicted to make a full recovery,” Muller writes. “Without your plan and training, this experience would have been much rougher. I feel very secure in my ability to lead my organization through this incident and back [to] the other side."

We have helped countless museums, archives, libraries, and historical societies identify risks, develop emergency response guidelines, and formulate full emergency plans for their collections. For more information on what we can do for your organization, visit our Emergency Planning & Response page or email us with questions.

You can view local news coverage of the incident below, courtesy of WNEP.