Fifty years after the Arno River breached its banks, the theme for this meeting was Emergency! Preparing for Disasters and Confronting the Unexpected in Conservation
Colleagues addressed in a broad-based way the impact of past, present, and future disasters on the protection of cultural property. In addition, confronting the unexpected in conservation--whether it occurs during the treatment of an artifact or during a natural disaster--was covered. The scope of the theme included immediate reactions, such as the application of crowd-mapping technology to aid response efforts, as well as longer term developments stemming from disasters, such as the adoption of simple strategies: Fail to Plan – Plan to Fail, effective risk assessment methodologies, the rapid transformation of damaged artifacts into objects of veneration, the repercussions of instantaneous visibility of destruction.