Week 8: October 7th

     Good evening, everybody! I hope everyone was safe during the impact of Hurricane Milton this week. It is because of the hurricane that I was only able to intern with the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse for Monday of this week since the rest of the week was spent prepping for the storm. However, the storm did provide me with a unique learning opportunity as I got to get a look at how a museum prepares its property and collection in case of major weather events such as hurricanes.

    When I arrived at the lighthouse on the morning of October 7th, everybody had been anticipating the storm that was predicting to arrive later that week. This meant that for the time being the normal duties of the interns was put on hold as Felipe, our supervisor, had us going through the files of the museum's safety guidelines to find the binder on hurricane preparation. Once we found that, we took stock of all the museum's supply bags. There was a bag for each building on the property and each one held a first aid kit, a flashlight, rubber gloves, paper towels, plastic sheeting, duct tape, masking tape, notepads, pencils, and scissors. In the worst-case scenario, the museum would want to house these supplies in each building of the museum and use them to secure the artifacts and displays that would be the most vulnerable to damage during a hurricane and possible flooding from storm surge. Thankfully, due to Hurricane Milton being projected to lose intensity as it moved east toward the Atlantic Ocean, Felipe and the museum's director did not believe these precautions to be necessary. The museum's maintenance team did begin to install shutters on each of the buildings' windows in case any debris made contact with them. 

    From there, we continued to work on organizing the placement of items at the Pacetti Hotel in PastPerfect. We only had a few small things left to categorize, so we took a quick visit over to the hotel to take more pictures and make sure we knew everything that had yet to be moved to its proper location in the computer. Then we returned to the offices of the museum to finish that batch of items and get them catalogued properly. Once completed, Felipe informed us that he was unsure if he would be absent during next week's internship hours since the FAM conference might have been postponed due to the storm, but that we should prepare to work on our own in any case.

    Overall, while I did not get to work with the museum much during this week, I certainly got an interesting look at the way that museums prepare for disaster. They have a long list of protocols in place and are fully prepared to take care of each of their artifacts.

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