Disaster Hunters

Staffers at IQ Magic launched a rescue mission of sorts after last week’s fierce Santa Ana windstorms. They had seen news accounts of the Altadena baby who escaped injury when her crib was smashed by a falling tree. And they wanted that crib.

Here was a golden opportunity for the Santa Monica firm as it carries out an unusual assignment: building a museum exhibit on California disasters.

The exhibit, which will center on fires, floods and earthquakes, is envisioned as an eye-catching piece of a history museum planned at the California State Archives in Sacramento. Part of a broader display on geography, the disaster exhibit will detail the often-stormy marriage between people and nature in the Golden State--and vividly illustrate just how difficult it can be to survive that relationship in Southern California.

“It’s a little creepy,” said Janet Fireman, a curator helping decide what artifacts to include. “But we’re doing it for a good purpose and educating people--telling people there’s a continuity in California’s disasters.”

Artifact collectors at IQ Magic, one of two firms hired to create the Golden State Museum’s 35 exhibits, are looking close to home for material. They would like to round up some portion of a home charred during the Malibu fires and perhaps a freeway I-beam twisted in the Northridge earthquake.

“We’re looking for things that can really show the cause and effect of the relationship between man and nature,” said Thomas Hartman, president of the company that develops exhibits for museums. “This area is pretty artifact-rich.”

The museum will tell the story of California settlement, development and governance through a theater and displays of archive documents, plus photographs, film footage and objects. The museum--organized under the headings of people, place, politics and promise--will open late this year or in early 1998.

Planners hope the disaster display helps illustrate how the state’s dramatically varied landscape has affected the lives of those who settled it--and how people, in turn, have reshaped nature. It’s a two-way street that can lead to disaster when windblown wildfires bear down on canyon homes or rivers defy levees built to tame them.

The exhibit is also meant to show how state agencies answered periodic calamities, said State Archivist John Burns.

“The real emphasis isn’t on the disasters. It’s on the response to the disasters on the part of the people and their representatives in government,” Burns said. “With the [recent] floods, we’re reminded again that as wonderful as California is, it’s a challenge living here.”

Putting a human face on that challenge means finding familiar items that have been damaged unmistakably by nature’s hand. This is where the crib comes in.

Year-old Jessica Romero, who was in the crib when the tree fell, was unhurt. “It’s a great artifact because a crib is something identifiable to people and has emotional impact--it’s a baby,” said Fireman, chief of history at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

The artifact-hunters hope to find equally compelling evidence of Southern California’s recent wildfires and the Northridge earthquake, and of floods and other disasters elsewhere in the state.

Hartman got the owner’s permission to pull the crib from the rubble, where, days after the storm, the little bed lay crooked and heaped with bits of roofing and wood. Hartman acknowledged that the windstorm paled in comparison with statewide disasters. But standing in the wrecked Altadena home, he could envision the crib’s impact in a museum exhibit, next to clippings and TV footage about the Santa Ana storm.

“People are really going to stop and take notice,” he said.