The Man With An Emergency Plan
Meet emergency preparedness specialist Les Borsay, famous around Getty for his sunny disposition, quick wit, and commitment to keeping everyone (and everything) safe
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The gist of what I do: An emergency planning specialist like me is responsible for the safety of an organization during disasters—by making sure that the organization can prepare for, respond to, and recover from any kind of disaster.
What does that mean at Getty? That I get to work with amazing people in all departments to ensure that our visitors, staff, buildings, and, of course, all the art are protected from any sort of trouble. I am responsible for fire extinguishers and a whole host of emergency supplies; I work with our technical and facilities staff to make sure our fire and water detection systems are fully functioning; I help train staff to respond to anything from a bloody nose to a leak endangering books to an earthquake.
California dreamin’: I grew up in the Midwest—Indiana and Ohio, with summers in Michigan. I was really nerdy; I played Atari a lot. We lived on a farm for a year and had three cows and some chickens. I hated the cows and also hated having to kill and pluck the chickens. My father set fire by mistake to some farmland near the house, and the fire department had to come. And my brother set an old barn on fire when he was a kid. So I did know a little about fire. But that was not exciting to me. I didn’t want to become a firefighter. I didn’t want to go into law enforcement. When I was a kid growing up in Indiana, I would watch the TV show CHiPs and marvel at Los Angeles. Ponch lived in an apartment complex with a pool in the center, and there were always attractive women lying out by the pool. And I’m looking outside at the farm, in what felt like the middle of nowhere, and it’s bleak and cold and miserable. And I’m like, “I need to live in LA.” In fourth grade I had an assignment to contact the city where I wanted to live and get information about it. Everybody else chose Chicago or Indianapolis or Cincinnati, but I sent a letter (in cursive) to the City of Los Angeles. They sent me back brochures showing sunshine, beaches, and mountains—paradise to a kid like me in cold, flat Indiana.
Making it in LA: I went to Augusta College, now Augusta University, and majored in communications. Then I came out to Los Angeles to get into the film industry. I wanted to be an actor. I did a couple of commercials and a few other roles, and I did improv for a while. But I had to have a job. I had to eat. So, I worked at the Hotel Roosevelt in Hollywood for a number of years as a front desk supervisor. Then I decided I didn’t want to do that anymore—I was not good at customer service. I got into a fistfight with a guy, so I thought, “I need to get out of this.” I got a job reselling mortgages on the secondary market. I spent two years at Countrywide, then I got another job at KB Home doing the same thing, and it was miserable. I remember driving home one day and thinking, “Maybe I’ve died and this is hell.” My roommate at the time had just started working at Getty in Human Resources and said, “You know, you should work here.” I saw that Getty had a temp job in security for an administrative position. I had no experience in security, but I was willing to take a chance to go work somewhere else. That was in May 2000.
Once I started the job, I couldn’t sit still. I was always asking: “Alright, what can I do? Can I help you?” At that time, we had a few consultants in emergency preparedness who worked with us, including Frank Borden, who developed the Community Emergency Response Team program. I worked on things like trainings, checking out the fire extinguishers, and being in Getty’s Emergency Outreach Center (EOC) during crises. I was in the EOC during 9/11 when the entire site was shut down. Everybody was sent home, but senior leadership was in the EOC, and I was writing on the whiteboard, watching the TV, as everyone was afraid that something might happen in LA. When my predecessor passed away in 2016, I transitioned into the job. This job is like a comfortable shoe. I didn’t know I needed this shoe, but this is the shoe that fits.
Keeping Getty safe: My philosophy is pretty simple: People first. Life safety is number one. It’s a trick question: What’s the most important thing to Getty? You might think it’s Irises by Vincent van Gogh. No, it’s not. Irises can’t take care of itself. I need to make sure the people are OK so they can take care of Irises. If a person is on fire and Irises is on fire, I’m putting out the person. Then the next part is, what can we do as far as the site? How can we make sure the site is safe, to make sure the people are safe and the collection is safe? Then the next part is working with the people who care for the art—the conservators and preparators. How can I make sure they’ve got what they need to be able to protect the art?
And people think the priority is always visitors first. No, it’s everybody first. For many of the visitors, this is their first time here, and I don’t get an hour to talk to them about safety and how to use a fire extinguisher and all that. They’re going to be freaked out if there is an emergency. So the security officers and the rest of the Getty staff have to be safe in order to get everybody else to safety.
What people might be surprised to learn about safety at Getty: The Getty Center and Getty Villa Museum are incredibly well built. When there’s an emergency, like a local brush fire, people think, “Where do you move the art?” Well, we don’t. These places were built with the idea that we’re going to protect the art. For example, our HVAC system is very good. During the Skirball Fire in 2017, which broke out around the 405 Freeway and Mulholland Drive, we closed the Center, and the conservators couldn’t come back for a few days. One of the paintings conservators told me, “I was watching the fire on TV and thought, ‘There’s the next year of my life—I’m going to be cleaning paintings,’” because of how much smoke was in the area. But she later told me there were no problems or issues with that at all.
New threats to museum safety: Let’s just say when I first started, my predecessor didn’t deal with active shooter situations like we talk about now. Also, 9/11 changed everyone’s thinking, and we started doing terrorism awareness training for our security officers. Before that, emergency preparedness was all about fires and earthquakes, and now it’s, what else could happen? We’re now doing trainings on dealing with art vandalism or an attempted art theft, and we’ve also started keeping Narcan on site, because on two different school trips at two different museums recently, kids have had to be taken to the hospital after consuming edibles. Fentanyl is so dangerous, and there’s so much out there that kids don’t even know about.
Biggest learnings: The Skirball Fire was a major lesson about communicating with our staff. The fire happened in the middle of the night, so we sent out a message to staff saying, “Nobody come in except for essential personnel.” But then one of the conservators came in anyway, because many of our staff members are so passionate about the artwork and want to make sure it’s okay. So now we don’t say things like “essential personnel.” We say, “people who are part of the emergency response team, and your supervisor will contact you.”
We’ve also learned to anticipate urgent questions from lenders. Maybe you work at the Louvre and just loaned us a Rubens, and you’re seeing this fire on the news. Who are you going to call? You’re going to call somebody in the registrar’s office and say, “What’s going on?” So during the Getty Fire in 2019, which broke out around the 405 Freeway and Getty Center Drive, we got really good about reaching out to the registrars and keeping them informed so they could say: “Hey, this is what we’re seeing. This is what we’re hearing. Everything’s okay.”
Best part of the job: There’s never a boring day in my job. And I’ll also say, there’s never a bad day. There are challenging days. But we’ve been lucky because people leave here alive. A big part of that is because the people I work with are so good at what they do. And I like the fact that I get to support great people. When I’ve finished my career here, I can look back on this place and say, “Yeah, this place has a great mission, and I supported that mission.” My role is to help keep people safe. How can you not love that? How can you not like doing that?
