Heritage Emergency Assistance Recovery Team aims to minimize loss in a natural disaster

Randy Silverman was one of the first conservators to go to Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. He wishes they'd gotten there sooner.

Since returning to his job in preservations at the University of Utah's Marriott Library, Silverman has thought a lot about what we would need to do in this state if we ever had a natural disaster.

What would happen, say, if an earthquake broke the water pipes all along the Wasatch Front? What would happen if Utah's historical treasures were soaking and starting to mold and we had no heat or electricity?

Well, Silverman figures that the museum directors in Utah, and their staff and all the librarians and archivists, would do what people in Mississippi and Louisiana did. First they'd make sure their families were safe. They'd figure out a way to feed themselves. They'd find a place to sleep. Then, within a matter of hours, or days, they'd be back at work.

They would be trying to save the state's treasures. But who would come to help them?

"We are a very collaborative bunch," says Joyce Ogburn, about the people who protect this nation's artifacts. Ogburn is the new director of the Marriott Library. Before coming to Utah, she'd been at the libraries at Yale, in Connecticut, and at Old Dominion, in Virginia. Most recently she'd been assistant director of the library at the University of Washington. She knows something about the problems of preservation in a variety of climates.

Ogburn took the job at the U. this fall. She'd only been there a few weeks when Silverman, whom she'd just met, asked to be allowed go to Mississippi. She said yes at once. "I supported it because of his experience and because of our commitment to national collaboration," Ogburn says.

The American Institute for Conservation chose the team, and the American Association for State and Local History found money for airline tickets (one grant came from the History Channel). But it was Ogburn who let Silverman take the time to go.

Silverman's was the first team to go in. Ultimately four teams, of four people each, went to Mississippi and four teams went to Louisiana. They called themselves HEART for Heritage Emergency Assistance Recovery Teams.

Silverman happened to know the teams were being formed because he was in Washington, D.C., a week after Katrina hit. He was at a meeting of conservators and the hurricane was all anyone could talk about.