AIC's 51st Annual Meeting

When Dorian Visited Our Museum:
How we can prepare to mitigate future impacts of worsening natural disasters on our collections
In recent times, island nations in the Caribbean have been facing increasingly devastating natural disasters. Investigations on these catastrophes have established a direct correlation to climate change (Zegarra, Schmid, Palomino, & Seminario, 2020). In 2019, a record-breaking category five hurricane completely obliterated cities on two islands in The Bahamas.
As mentioned, The Bahamas is not the only island nation suffering at the hands of climate change. In the past decade, hurricanes such as Maria (2017), Irma (2017), Isaias (2020), etcetera have been sweeping the length of the Caribbean devastating cities/town in their path ensuing millions of dollars in damages. In 2022, The Bahamas hosted a Regional Heads of Government Meeting to discuss approaches to climate change.
To further discussions had at the conference, this work will focus on Dorian’s impact on an invaluable collections on the island of Abaco, Bahamas. Workers and volunteers laboured to recover materials from the collection. Despite the losses, this disaster provides insight on how we can create practical/realistic emergency conservation plans that suit museums in this region when storms like Dorian come to visit.