Flooding of museum storage
The risk that a museum's storage, often in basements, is flooded by a river rise or a burst pipe, threatening tens of thousands of undisplayed objects at once.
Most of a museum's collection is not on display: it sits in storage, historically located in basements for lack of space elsewhere. In a city crossed by a river, this storage is exposed to floods, and everywhere to leaks, burst pipes or firefighting water. The damage is massive and fast, since water reaches thousands of fragile objects at once, paper, textiles, painted wood. Prevention relies on a collection rescue plan, which prioritizes objects for evacuation and organizes teams and resources, on moving storage out of flood zones and on monitoring water levels. For insured collections, the underwriter looks at the location of storage, its elevation relative to the highest known water levels and how real the evacuation plan is, often more than at the value of the works on display.
During the Seine flood of June 2016, the Louvre closed its doors to move works out of its flood-prone storage; in 2019 it opened a conservation center in Liévin designed to house some 250,000 works until then stored in the flood zone.
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