Fighting Fire at the Getty Villa Museum

Getty emergency preparedness specialist Les Borsay was in the middle of routine testing of the Getty Villa Museum’s fire alarm system at around 10 a.m. on January 7 when he got a text from PulsePoint, an emergency alert app.

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A brush fire had broken out about two miles away in the Palisades Highlands.

Wildfires are a way of life in Southern California; in fact, another one had erupted in the Palisades Highlands last fall. Firefighters knocked it down pretty quickly, but this new outbreak, it soon became clear, was a much different beast.

“That thing came down the hill fast,” Borsay says. “The winds were really bad. I think it was less than two hours, and it was already really, really close.”

That Borsay happened to be testing Getty’s fire alarm system when the blaze broke out offers a window into how seriously Getty takes emergency preparedness. The site’s construction and groundskeeping, as well as strategic efforts by local firefighters, helped spare the Villa from major damage. And when flames popped up in and around the Villa grounds, a front line of staff fought off the flare-ups themselves.

“We’re here thanks to the work of the grounds, security, and facilities departments,” Borsay says. “We’re here thanks to the people who built the Villa the way it is, 100 percent. And we’re also here thanks to the firefighters, there’s no question.”

The “James Bond” of museum construction

Even as the Palisades fire spread closer and closer to the Villa, the contents inside stayed put. That’s because the galleries and storage areas are well engineered, with state-of-the-art features that make them the safest possible place for art and archives during a fire. “Everybody always told me about the James-Bond–like construction of our sites,” says Getty President and CEO Katherine E. Fleming. This was the first major fire incident at Getty since she took the helm in 2022. “And then I actually saw it in action. It is pretty astonishing.”

The Villa’s walls are built of reinforced concrete and topped with a tile roof; both features help protect against fire. The buildings are also designed with fire separations, in which fire-rated doors can stop the spread of smoke or fire throughout the rest of the site. A carbon-filtered air conditioning system maintains a pressure flow that can be increased as needed to keep smoke and ash out. A fire detection system is installed in each room that is set at a very low threshold to detect a fire in the early incipient stage. Fire sprinklers are also available but are kept completely dry to avoid accidental water intrusion. They are activated only as a last resort. A back-up water reservoir provides water in the event that the Villa loses water pressure from the primary utility. Emergency electrical generators are also installed and can continue to run the Villa’s fire system, emergency lighting, and other critical systems for weeks in the event of a power outage.

Outside, the gardens and surrounding landscape are also designed and maintained to mitigate the risk of fire. A complex irrigation system keeps the soil damp as needed. Oak trees border the property, specifically because they absorb water well and don’t burn as quickly as other vegetation. And grounds staff meticulously clear low-lying brush and maintain tree lines throughout the year, working beyond the radius the Los Angeles Fire Department requires.

“It’s incredible how much effort it takes to do this,” says grounds manager Luis Gomez. “There’s wildlife. There’s poison oak and plants with thorns. The crews go out there year after year, during the heat, with heavy gear, making sure we’re safe.”

It’s not just the building and site’s design that keeps the Villa safe. The Villa’s strength is also a testament to the staff who dedicate hours of training and planning each year to emergency preparedness, and follow processes that have been carefully mapped out in advance. Institutions around the world seek out Getty's expertise in fire mitigation.

“The reason the Villa is still standing after this fire is our strong culture of safety,” says Michael Rogers, director of facilities. “For decades we in facilities leadership and security plan for events like this—fire, earthquake, floods, etc. Strong procedures are in place and staff followed procedures to protect the place.”

Fire on the ground

As black smoke in the distance billowed and flames rushed down the hills, fire prevention procedures progressed at the Villa like clockwork. Its irrigation sprinklers were activated. All staff headed home, except for about a dozen members of the security and facilities teams who volunteered to stay. The on-site group worked out of a room dubbed the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) inside the Villa and kept in constant touch with a small group of staff monitoring the situation from the Getty Center’s EOC. Outfitted with monitors, the Center’s EOC could sometimes capture what was happening even better than the Villa’s, and staff at the Center helped relay messages when some of the radios at the Villa stopped working.

The Villa’s building management system—which regulates the building’s HVAC system—were activated, and the museum doors were sealed. Villa engineering manager Vlad Slavin monitored the humidity inside the galleries and responded when fire alarms sounded.

The teams at both the Center and Villa watched the Villa’s security cameras for signs of fire. Some members also patrolled the site in security vehicles to monitor it in person. They rotated keeping watch at specific locations, including more vulnerable areas such as a parking area for vehicles that would have been extremely dangerous if it ignited.

Throughout the day and into the night, staff took turns venturing into the hot, smoky air to put out small fires or hot spots with extinguishers, shovels, or by stamping them out. (Personnel wore N95 masks and goggles and were instructed to come back inside within 20 to 30 minutes.) Trees popped as embers flew through the air. Fires erupted in rosemary vines by the visitor parking lot and plants above the Outdoor Classical Theater, on the hillside next to the neighboring Villa de Leon estate (unaffiliated with the Getty Villa), and outside the Villa’s front gate. “The problem was the winds. As soon as we sprayed one fire, there was another behind us,” says security supervisor Carl Gordon. “We must have gone through at least 40 five-pound extinguishers.”

Gordon and his teammates are not firefighters, but they felt a pull to protect the Villa, even though they weren’t required to stay.

“Family members were calling the security officers and asking us, ‘Why haven’t you left? Why haven’t you gone? What is wrong with you?’” says Gordon, who’s worked at Getty for 30 years. “I’ve not come to an answer as to what was wrong with me that day, but I knew that we needed to hold down the fort. When you have been someplace for so long, you have a sense of responsibility, and you feel like it’s yours.”

Borsay says he ended up spending 28 hours straight at the Villa; others stayed 72 hours, monitoring the site and its systems and taking turns sleeping on cots.

“Everyone was just so calm; nobody complained,” Borsay says. “Everybody said, ‘How can I help? Where’s another fire?’”

As the flames closed in around the Villa, staff called 911 to help guide firefighters to nearby blazes. A helicopter dropped water onto a hillside adjacent to the Ranch House—the original Getty Museum, which opened to the public in 1954—likely saving it from disaster. Firefighters were also welcomed to take water from the Villa’s 50,000-gallon water tank to refill their own firetrucks. Though no firefighters were specifically tasked with protecting the Villa, their efforts to defend the surrounding neighborhood helped keep the terrifying walls of fire from encroaching on any of the Villa’s structures.

When the smoke cleared (literally), the Villa was still standing, undamaged. Inside the museum, the art remained perfectly safe—“You could have gone with white gloves over the surfaces of the art and not picked up a single speck of dust,” Fleming says.

The Villa’s formal gardens were intact; however, much of the surrounding landscape has been damaged, including burnt trees and coastal sage scrub habitats reduced to ash. A surface layer of water-repelling soil could also form. “To know the extent of this will take a bit more time,” says Brian Houck, head of grounds and garden.

Perhaps the most striking evidence of the fire that surrounded the Villa that night: the water in the fountains. Under the watchful eyes of the replica Roman statues surrounding them, it had turned black with ash.

A Getty-wide effort

While staff fought the fire on the ground, other Getty teams rallied to take care of other pressing concerns sparked by the fire.

Museum leadership reassured worried representatives from institutions around the world that the art they had lent to Getty was still safe. New housing had to be found for members of the Getty Scholars Program, since they were residing in an apartment complex within an evacuation zone. From the Center’s EOC, Getty leadership also kept track of the status of the Pacific Palisades community and Getty employees who had been affected. “It was very real to us that there was a neighborhood and people around us who were in the midst of their own hell as well,” Fleming says. “We were all in it together, and we were very worried about them.” In fact, on several occasions, security staff provided food, water, ice, and flashlights to neighbors who were stranded in nearby homes.

Getty Foundation Director Joan Weinstein began thinking about how Getty could help members of the artist community affected by the disaster (more on that below).

From the Center’s EOC, the communications team relayed crucial information about the status of the inferno to hundreds of Getty staff anxious to hear updates, as well as to curious media outlets around the world. That included answering questions people asked on social media about the status of the Villa and correcting misinformation that spread almost as rapidly as the fire.

“One TV news station was at the Villa de Leon estate when it was on fire, saying it was the Getty Villa,” remembers Alexandria Sivak, assistant director of news and media relations. “I literally called their newsroom and said, ‘Can you tell the reporter that’s not the Getty Villa?’ At a certain point, we realized that there’s only so much you could do.”

The aftermath

After the worst of the blaze passed, Getty crews kept busy replacing damaged fire sprinklers in the parking lot, monitoring the gates for potential looters, checking the site for hot spots (even a week later, a small flare-up broke out on a hill near a parking lot), and working with firefighter units passing through the area to conduct safety checks. Borsay always offered them a map of the site, cookies, water, showers, and access to a toilet—all much appreciated by the exhausted crews.

In the months to come, the Villa’s grounds will undergo extensive cleanup, and the irrigation system, damaged in the fire, will need to be fixed. The emotional and financial recovery for those who lost their homes or livelihoods will take much more time, of course. To help, Getty has partnered with a coalition of major arts organizations and philanthropists in Los Angeles to launch the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund. Artists and arts workers in all disciplines who have been impacted by the incident can apply for an emergency grant.

Camille Kirk, Getty’s director of sustainability, says she’s looking forward to being part of a dialogue in the region about resilient recovery and sharing Getty’s learnings—after all, this certainly isn’t the last fire the LA region will encounter. “We have to find ways to live more harmoniously with nature in this ecosystem, under climate change,” Kirk says.

Art institutions like Getty can also be a part of the difficult process of making sense of this traumatic event. Kirk reminds us that one of the roles of the arts and humanities is to help us process our world and create understanding. Perhaps artists are better equipped than most to offer a way to comprehend the disaster and to navigate how to move forward when faced with a loss of this magnitude.

“Art creates respites and opportunities for coming together, finding joy, experiencing wonder, being inspired, or learning how to take action,” Kirk says. “Art also helps us make sense of what feels, frankly, overwhelming and nonsensical.”