In preparing for disasters, museums face tough choices

IT IS 3AM. You are the director of a gallery and you are woken by the phone call you dread. Your gallery is on fire. Each of its rooms contains around ten works of art. Each work is worth millions, perhaps tens of millions. From the moment a fire alarm sounds, you have “a matter of minutes”, says William Knatchbull, head of heritage planning at the London Fire Brigade, to get your artefacts out. Ideally, you would save them all. But you can’t: the fire is burning, the temperature is rising and the clock is ticking. It is time to choose.