By Helen Alten

Reprinted from February 2015 Collections Caretaker

The Impact of Disasters on People

Events of all sizes create a notable disruption in people's lives because these events cause significant change. The trauma of a disaster results in cognitive, behavioral, emotional, physical, and spiritual responses in those affected by it, including the recovery workers.

The emotional and physical response of each person depends on many factors. These include the intensity of the disaster; the time between the event and recovery; the emotional and physical strength of the individual; the depth of feelings and level of panic felt by the individual; and prior experience with a similar event.

Emotional symptoms that might occur include irritability, anger, denial, fear, sadness, depression, grief, mood swings, isolation and withdrawal, feeling helpless and overwhelmed, and self-blame and/or blaming others. Physical symptoms can include loss of appetite, insomnia, fatigue or hyperactivity, concentration and memory problems, or increased use of alcohol or drugs. No one should be blamed for their reactions. All of these are coping mechanisms in a difficult time. It is important that we understand that all of this is normal, needs to be accepted, and needs to be treated before it makes the disaster much worse than it already is.

Psychological First Aid

Psychological First Aid is part of the recovery process as much as physical stabilization of your artifacts. It involves providing contact, engagement, safety and comfort for each individual. A therapist identifies the needs and concerns of each person and provides them with practical assistance and information on coping methods, social supports and collaborative services that can provide more help. Remember, after the first few hours, the members of a recovery team are also psychologically affected by the disaster.

A therapist's first contact with those affected by a disaster should address needs of individuals, families and communities. The goal is to reduce the initial distress caused by traumatic events. Then the therapist works to foster short and long-term adaptive functioning in each person, according to the culture and the ages of the affected individuals.

When making contact with survivors of a disaster it is important to be gentle, compassionate, and respectful of individual feelings. The therapist's contact should be suggestive, not conclusive, informal and unobtrusive. It takes time for survivors to feel safe and trusting. Patience is important to reduce fear and apprehension. Answer pressing questions, concerns and needs, and support their individual coping efforts.

The impact of trauma can reduce the ability to concentrate, disrupt attention, and impair cognitive skills. Think about when someone near to you died. Did you have trouble remembering where you put the car keys? Were you wandering around, forgetting important things, feeling like a zombie? Trauma can lead to regression and poor coping mechanisms that result in anger. It is important to create and sustain better feelings around these individuals by stressing safety and staying calm. Create an atmosphere that promotes connections with others and self-sufficiency, empowerment and hope. 

First Responders are not immune

First responders are not immune to psychological reactions to disaster situations. First responders include emergency management personnel, healthcare workers, psychologists and social workers, contractors, museum/library conservators and staff and volunteers. Some of the factors causing stress in first responders are long hours, not knowing the duration of the deployment, unfamiliar context, new challenges, time pressures, multiple or conflicting priorities, previous traumatic experiences, and fear of death, injury and/or illness.

Mitigation Strategies

Mitigation strategies include briefing personnel before the response operation begins. Make everyone aware of the expected emotional responses in victims and responders. Emphasize teamwork and sharing both the workload and the emotional load. Assign partners to help each other and be sure to rotate personnel to minimize fatigue. Take breaks away from the incident area and emphasize the need for good nutrition, frequent water breaks, and rest. Talk about the experience and phase-out workers by gradually assigning them to easier recovery activities. If possible, include daily debriefing. Add a therapist to the recovery team to help people continue to cope effectively.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is an intense physical and emotional response to thoughts and reminders about the traumatic event. If you see symptoms within yourself or one of your colleagues, reach out for assistance. Do not suffer in silence. Disasters and other traumatic events affect everyone. Be a survivor and not a victim.

Helen Alten founded Northern States Conservation Center 18 years ago and museumclasses.org10 years ago. She is an objects conservator with a desire to bring about change through museums, improving our communities and the patrimony we leave to our off-spring.   

By Karl Hoerig

Museum store security starts with museum security. When thinking about security, you must consider all of the threats your facility, collections, and shop might face.That includes the obvious threat of loss or damage due to the acts of criminally-inclined people. It also includes threats like the threat of loss to fire, or damage that can be caused by water--either by way of natural floods or by the unwanted introduction of water from broken pipes or failed fire-sprinkler heads.  Your store inventory and cash is far less sensitive than your museum collections, so the protection you have for your facility (you do have it, right?) should be more than adequate to protect your shop.

Hopefully your facility has adequate and appropriate monitoring and alarm systems for fire, water, and intrusion. At the very least, your museum should have a central alarm system that is monitored all the time. This system should include smoke and/or heat detectors in every room; water sensors anywhere you might have water coming into your facility (e.g. basements); a flow sensor attached to your fire sprinkler system if you have one; and perimeter and interior motion detectors to sense unauthorized after-hours access.

Unless you have your own 24-hour security team, you should contract with an alarm monitoring company that will alert your local fire and police departments and call you if an alarm is tripped.

If your museum store is located inside your museum facility, it should be included in the net of protection provided by this system. If your shop is not inside your main facility, try at a minimum to maintain a monitored intrusion and fire alarm system for your shop. You should be able to add it to your main facility's monitoring contract.

Security during business hours is a bit more of a worry. Unlike your collections storage areas or the locked cases in your exhibit galleries, you want people -- as many people as possible -- to come into your museum store and to touch your merchandise.

Your first consideration should always be for the personal safety of your staff. They are not paid enough, nor are they trained to serve as a private police force. Everyone on your staff should understand that they are not expected to place themselves in danger to protect merchandise or cash. If confronted by an assailant that they deem to be dangerous, no museum shop staff member should ever do anything that could place them in danger. If a bad guy has a weapon or makes a threat, let them take the stuff, then call the police.

Another issue to be aware of is that it may not be legal for you or your staff to detain someone who has stolen from your store. Forcibly detaining someone might give them grounds for civil and criminal complaints against you, in addition to potentially being dangerous. Always be careful when confronting someone you suspect of shoplifting or other theft.

That being said, there are lots of things that you and your staff can do to eliminate the likelihood of ever having to deal with bad guys.

We have a rule that there must always be at least two museum personnel in near proximity to the admissions desk and museum store. This helps to insure the safety of our staff, and also guarantees that we've got extra help nearby if a tour bus unexpectedly shows up.

Events like armed robberies or after-hours break-ins are thankfully fairly rare. The two most common sources of loss in retail stores are shoplifting and employee theft. Shoplifting is an obvious threat.

Unfortunately, employee theft is not as uncommon as we'd like it to be. Of course, none of our staffs would ever steal from our stores, but there are times when people just seem to think that since we've got 100 of those t-shirts in stock, no one will ever miss one, or who just can't handle the volume of cash that touches their fingers without some of it ending up in their pockets.

In all matters relating to security, vigilance is the key to minimizing problems. You and your staff should always remain aware. If someone is acting strangely or the numbers don't seem quite right, something probably is not quite right.

The good news is, just having a well-trained staff who do their jobs is the most important thing you can do. For example, shoplifters are much less likely to try to steal if they know someone is watching them.

Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart and the most successful retailer of all time, came up with the idea to put greeters at the entrance to each of his stores because he figured that no one would steal if they thought their grandmother was watching them. It makes a difference.

If your store staff is paying attention to each guest that enters your store, greeting them and following the other recommendations for good customer service, you remove most opportunities that those so inclined would have to steal from your store. 

Do everything you can to make it easy for your staff to see what's going on in the store at all times.

This includes things like cash register placement. When developing your store layout you do not want to put the "cash and wrap" in a spot that will block interested shoppers from getting into the store (the problem we have at Nohwike' Bágowa), but you do want to place it where your staff can easily see the store exits and the sales floor.

It's also a good idea not to display small, unsecured items in a back corner of the shop, or anywhere else where it's easy for a shoplifter to access them unseen.

As discussed before, I think there is real merchandising value to placing items where shoppers can touch them. Try to create those opportunities in places where your shop staff will be able to keep an eye on the activity, like near your checkout counter. This is all obvious, common-sense stuff, but it does make a difference in discouraging "shrinkage."

Minimizing employee theft is also mostly common sense. Well trained, engaged staff members who are personally invested in your institution's success are less likely to be inclined to steal. 

Be sure you keep close tabs on your sales, cash transactions, and inventory. You should trust your employees, but also make it your responsibility to keep track of what's going on. Building a culture of trust in which everyone knows their job and is always aware of your store's mission will help.

You can't always tell who might succumb to temptation, as I have unfortunately learned the hard way.

Cameras:

Security cameras can be helpful deterrents to all forms of theft. In fact, the simple presence of visible cameras can be enough to discourage many would-be thieves.

In the past, there was a thriving business in pseudo-security cameras: fakes that businesses installed to make people think that they were being filmed.  In the last few years real camera systems have gotten so much better and cheaper that it doesn't make sense to pay for fakes anymore.

Security cameras are useful, but they are not the be-all, end-all answer to store security. One of the most significant limitations to security cameras is that you have to know something has happened, and generally when it happened, for them to be of any real value. You will likely not be able to afford to have a security person monitoring your cameras all the time, and you can easily find yourself spending dozens of hours watching your security footage if you know something has happened but not when. Example: that $600 soapstone sculpture that was on that display stand with five other sculptures is missing. We noticed it today, but who knows how long it's been gone.

So you go to your surveillance video files and check the (digital equivalent of) tape for each morning going back until you see the piece there (if you happen to have a camera where it would be visible). Then you have to narrow down your search by each hour until you see it missing, then watch to see what happened to it. If you do not get a good view of the thief, or no one from your staff recognizes the perpetrator, you still don't get much out of it. If the stolen piece is not clearly visible from your security cameras, you will never be able to track when it was taken.

But they can work! We were using an antiquated VHS tape-based system when a kid stole our donation box a few years ago.