The Getty Villa, the museum built by oil tycoon J. Paul Getty and home to thousands of priceless antiquities, activated its emergency operations center in response to the fast-moving Palisades fire at 10:40 a.m. Tuesday. At 11:44 a.m., fire could be seen over the ridge, less than one mile away. By 12:27, flames had reached the property.
Fast-moving, wildly unpredictable and catastrophic in the damage it caused along a vast swath of prime coastline, the Palisades fire ultimately spared the Villa and its more than 44,000 objects, including many Roman, Greek and Etruscan relics dating from 6500 BC to AD 400.
J. Paul Getty Trust President and Chief Executive Katherine E. Fleming described for The Times the scene on the ground and how she and her staff worked from a conference center-turned-war room at the Getty Center in Brentwood, about 10 miles away — all while 16 staff members remained at the Villa to implement emergency protocols.
“We did get lucky in some ways, and people were rushing around,” Fleming said in an interview Wednesday evening after the most immediate danger had passed. “But there were also a lot of people who were really thoughtful about this over a long period of time, and I think that clearly paid off for us.”
Extensive brush-clearing over the last year, Fleming said, had been completed with the knowledge that fire is a way of life in Los Angeles, and that the region’s frequent periods of drought made a massively destructive fire inevitable. The museum had already pruned landscaping that might catch fire and made sure tree canopies were high off the ground. Low-lying brush had been significantly thinned. The grounds were irrigated Tuesday morning.
Fleming offered a riveting play-by-play of the day’s events. The staff members who remained at the Villa worked in emergency response, facilities, security and communications — each highly trained in emergency preparations. When the fire broke out, the biggest concern was protecting the collections from the damaging effects of smoke. The double-walled construction of the galleries provided significant protection, and at 10:45 a.m., the dampers — small valves that regulate airflow in a building’s HVAC system — were turned off, as was the air conditioning. The staff still smelled smoke, so the museum doors were sealed at 11:04 a.m. The smoke became overwhelming by 11:15, and at 11:20 the staff was sent an email alerting them that the Villa was closing.
About 20 minutes later, security swept the grounds to make sure only emergency staff was on site. Heat from the fire caused several cameras to fail to reboot. Ten minutes later, an aerial fire crew dropped water over the Villa’s ranch house, which Fleming said is at the perimeter of the property and most vulnerable to fire. (The ranch house was J. Paul Getty’s original residence and was not built with the same fire-resistant construction as the Villa.)
Fleming noted that communication between the two sites was difficult. Villa employees’ radios stopped transmitting when they were more than 100 feet away from one another. That meant staff in the Getty command center in Brentwood — about 15 people in total, sitting at a large conference table — had to relay pertinent information to each staffer at the Villa.
“We have cameras on pretty much every single conceivable part of the Villa property that you can zoom in with great specificity,” Fleming said. “There were instances where we would know something and have to relay it back to someone at the Villa.”
Over the course of the day and night, Fleming said, “we had all kinds of live video feed coming to us up at the Getty Center from the Villa.” When accumulating ash prevented the water from draining in the parking structure, a staff member was deployed to clear it.
At around 2:40 p.m., Fleming said, the perimeter wall behind the restaurant was in flames. Then, at close to 3:15 p.m., bushes directly above the outdoor classical theater caught fire. This was probably Fleming’s biggest moment of panic during the whole ordeal, she said, adding that it was “a total red herring.”
The fire came from a plant bed filled with rosemary.
“And lo and behold, just like if you sprinkle a bunch of rosemary on a pizza and put it under the broiler and it crackles and sparkles, and then very rapidly goes out,” Fleming said. “That happens … and for someone like me, who doesn’t know a lot about how fires work, it looked really bright and fiery for a few moments.”
The wall flames died down on their own, but at 3:59 p.m., fire erupted at the museum’s pedestrian gate. Getty security put out the blaze with fire extinguishers in just six minutes. The Palisades fire grew large enough for staff at the Getty Center in Brentwood to see the flames by 5 p.m. At 6 p.m., museum officials made the decision to close that campus to help alleviate traffic in the area.
People on social media and news sites may have seen images of flames whipping next to a structure by the Getty Villa sign on Pacific Coast Highway. That structure was not the museum but rather Villa de Leon, a 35-room Italian Revival mansion that’s not affiliated with the museum.
Villa teams continued to monitor the fire threat throughout the night, and for now the Villa appears to be safe.
“A lot of what there was to burn has burned. The rosemary is gone. The low-level vegetation is gone,” said Fleming, who added that she was too superstitious to say the danger had completely passed.
