The Mid Continent Museum flooding brings to mind an idea. Flooding or roof collapse from snow, or Fire, what ever can strike any of our sites…

What if we collectively put together an informal on call rescue crew. For someone like Mid Continent it might mean outside volunteers descend on the site in three weeks for a long weekend to jack up cars, clean journals and bearings and put some cars back in operation.

If your roof collapsed like B&O, or a minor fire, or cleaning a flooded building; it could mean volunteers skilled in artifact handling participate in a effort to move artifacts from the damaged building, doing light cleaning as needed and identify possible needed conservation (or maybe just part of the bucket brigade that moves the artifacts away from the damaged site. (I understand that California State Museum staff helped document the damage after the B&O disaster)

We could include volunteers skilled in disaster management, in public affairs, in photography (to shoot photos of each artifact) or railroad specific skills like car repair or track work…

Six months ago our historic house was hit by a minor earthquake. I had three messages on the answering machine asking if I needed help from members of our local house museum association.

We might want to have available a supply of rubber gloves, milk crates, and such to be used in such efforts. We may need an organization such as ARM to coordinate, with member museums to host the storage of supplies.

I do not think it is a bad idea, and in my heart wish there were something to help, sitting helplessly at the computer. With the cost of travel and fuel, it might make sense to do this on a regional basis.

But even then, how to organize it and set up the logistics? This would be dirty heartbreaking work, and in some cases I suspect the victim of the disaster might be stunned, as I am looking at the Mid Continent pics.

Where do you start?

Bob Kutella

Just a quick thought - will flesh this out more later -
Use disaster response models already in place - just substitute "railway museum/railroad" for "city/town/village"? Borrow some pages from ICRC (Red Cross), national Disaster Mgmt. programs, etc.?


Our thoughts are with all affected by the flooding.

Melanie

As Melanie points out, there are online resources to start with.

About 3 years ago, I put together a disaster recovery plan for my company, in many respects you're looking to duplicate similar thoughts and needs. I freely admit to "hijacking" the vast majority of what I needed from the web and then editing to our specific needs.

The big issue here though seems to be the manpower equation. As most sites are primarily volunteer operated, it's difficult to quantify what can be done as so much of your planning has to be worked around that most important resouce, people and available time.

As Bob points out, in a time with a weak economy, high gas prices, etc,, even those folks that might be willing and able to spend a weekend helping out, may have to bow out due to these types of restraints.

A couple of at least potential rmanpower resource possibilities might be
students from the local high school/colleges, and the local National Guard (although these folks are strained at present with the war)

It seems to me what might be needed most at North Freedom is a small operable steam or diesel locomotive. This would be needed for track repairs and could actually haul tourist trains before other repairs are completed. The latter if there is a serviceable coach available.
O. Anderson

I offer the following as things to think about and constructive criticism, not as nay-saying:

A flood at Mid-Continent is different from a roof collapse at the B&O Museum, which differs from a flood at the Wilmington & Western, a fire at Cumbres & Toltec, etc. Some of the issues I see arising:

Insurance, both in terms of covering volunteers and the insurance on the affected property. Crisis or no crisis, will a place like the B&O Museum be willing to let "strangers" in to "help"?

How would said volunteers be "vetted"? Sure, you and I reading this may know who Linn Moedinger and Kelly Anderson are, but they're too busy, so they send a couple junior workers who may have forgotten more about, say, friction bearings or wooden car restoration than we'll ever know, but who's to vouch for them? I can drive a forklift and run a backhoe, but I don't happen to have certification of my experience--should I be allowed to run a forklift if I'm the only volunteer on site with the willingness, or do we await a "certified" operator?

Based on my experience after our fire in 2003, I'm not sure what an RyPN disaster response team would have done to help us. On the other hand, the fact that RyPN exists opens a whole network at a moment's notice if and when technical help is needed. And I am grateful for several regulars here who were of assistance when called upon!

Wesley

How do you vet them ordinarily?

You are concerned about something that every railway museum faces every time they accept a new volunteer. The simple fact is, nobody knows anybody, but what we >DO< know is that this new person likes trains enough to give their Saturdays to a charitable organization. Has that ever been insufficient?

So I don't see how it suddenly becomes insufficient when we have the added credential of a person being willing to fly into a disaster area, put up with disaster-area amenities, forego salary, forego their normal life to help YOU. Color me wildly curious as to what additional requirement you might have.

In a word, yes. I have been "shooed away" from assisting certain railroad projects because I was not a member of "the organization," or a specific chapter of one. This would be understandable if I were offering to do mechanical hands-on work on a piece of equipment or an excursion; when it's offering to write a history of the line, create website content, donate professional-grade photography, etc., it seems foolish.

And trust me on this, there are certain administrators and/or bureaucrats that have had hard-wired into their thinking a mindset of existing to grant permission, not to make things happen, even in a time of crisis.

To answer some of the questions raised by my suggestion…

1) This would not replace a site specific disaster recovery plan… They are needed.
2) This would be an informal collection of semi skilled volunteers, possibly vetted via their home museum in advance, who could help with things like pulling friction bearings, or sorting damp artifacts which while it requires some level of railroad knowledge, is not on the same level as boiler work. Keep the boy scouts, red cross and military reserve for shoveling mud out of the depot.
3) There is a new, growing concept of the volunteering vacation. It is a concept which has grown since the gulf hurricane, with people choosing to go to a disaster site and help out for a week instead of spending a week on the beach in Mexico.

What if you disaster recovery plan could include some level of expectation that several weeks after the disaster some volunteers would show up, with some level of credential and vetting, (a museum could accept a forklift certificate from another museum) able to speak railroad preservation and lend a hand. As the local volunteers are getting tired and cranky they would see the cavalry come over the hill side, bugles blaring.

In the case of our collective Northern CA house museums we are thinking that some common supplies, useful in cases of local rather than regional emergencies (i.e. an earthquake would hit us all, so would limit regional pooling) might be held collectively… for example milk crates to move wet artifacts due to a broken water pipe.

In the case of Mid Continent, the Chicago area museums, maybe the Twin Cities museums are close enough to drive up in a day. From the coasts roundtrip air fair to Chicago is less than $300. If there was a system to call for aid it might be available… How many of us would it take to pull all the journal packing from the cars? What if a couple of bales of waste could be sourced from other museums in an emergency like this?

Acknowledging that we are too late for this event… What if three weeks from now we (maybe 20 of us) arrived with three sets of car jacks and some supplies for a three day visit. Mud would be shoveled, and the line of cars in the web cam view would be moveable if not ready for service.… We would work like dogs all day, eat hamburgers and hotdogs for dinner and lunch, get muddy, dirty, tired, but leave knowing the group was better off. The local volunteers would know that someone cared.

The downside is a track would go un-repaired at Union. A car restoration project in California would be pushed back a month. Some of us would be out our airfare… Some ones back would hurt… Collectively we (and railroad preservation) would all win.

First off,, if anyone wants to make this "calvary charge" in a couple weeks or so,, let's start a concerted effort to organize it, including getting some input from MCRM as to what they feel they'll most want or need at the time. They're the ones best able to determine what they can even support in terms of extra bodies, too many bodies standing around with not much to do, and/or specific direction won't help anyone.

I'm in the NW Chicago suburbs, up for the challenge, and able to ferry 2-3 extra bodies either from Chicago's O'Hare airport or the nw suburban area. O'Hare is roughly 180 miles from MCRM as the crow flies, should be a decent sized pool of able bodied and like minded help available along the way. If any one of the local museums wants to donate/loan some equipment for the short term, I'm available to help out just ferrying back and forth, just contact me by PM.

Just as importantly, and as has been pointed out perhaps too late for this specific event, there needs to be some means of vetting, accreditation, however you might wish to phrase it.

I put myself up as a prime example, I have been involved at several museums over the last 30 years, and at each new place had to "prove" myself. Nothing wrong with that in any way shape or form. But now I find myself having been out of the hands-on part of the preservation process for about 8 years. I have the knowledge, skills, desire and ability, but how to prove it ?

To take nothing away from the "grunt" labor that is needed to help with MCRM's current woes (and simply using them as a current example), I could be as much, if not more help, at least potentially, operating heavy equipment such as a backhoe, forklift, front-end loader, etc, even operating some of their diesel equipment if the need arose.

From my work experience I have forklift certification for both reach trucks, and standard forklifts up to a 22,000 lb capacity, but for the backhoe or front-end loaders, or any type of actual railroad equipment, all my experience has been hands-on museum work with no means to prove it.

This accreditation process and the reporting would have to be handled nationally. There would be a burden on some level for the local museums to "sign-off" on someone's abilities, but I see this as while painful, a benefit in the long-run. If someone from any museum moves across the country for work, etc, and finds themselves a new home at a new museum shop,, why should that person have to prove themselves, from the ground up, simply because they're not a known name in the museum world ?

A good example might be the steam program at IRM. Over the last handful of years they've quietly and steadily rebuilt what was an almost dead department into a strong unit which has operating steam at IRM within the next year a real probability. But to much of the outside world, no one knows any of these guys, after all with the exception of a very few real notables, aren't all of us pretty anonymous outside even our own museum gates ? To have one of those guys move cross country and have to start with sweeping the shop floor, or whatever, is simply a waste of what museums lack the most,, talented manpower.

This is of course something of an extreme example, but it clearly defines the problem,a problem that should be relatively easy to address and correct.

Of that there is no doubt.

And those are judgment calls. Sometimes the right thing to do is either bulldoze through or do an end-run around the naysayer. Other times it's to listen to them and do what they need done rather than what you want to do. Other times it's to take your marbles and go home.

Dealing with the "only human"-ness of volunteer organizations is part of volunteering, and of course just to keep it interesting, one of the "only humans" is you :)