Everyone knew it was coming—it had been predicted for years. But when the River Seine began to overflow in Paris in June, the caretakers of the city’s great museums trembled in their boots. Staff scrambled to move tens of thousands of works to higher ground. Now that the waters have receded, museums are left reassessing their storage systems and emergency procedures.
It should not have caused such panic: in 2002, officials warned that a great flood similar to the one that engulfed the city in January 1910 was expected sooner rather than later. On that occasion, the river’s water level reached 8.63 metres. During the recent floods, the Seine peaked at 6.1 metres, the highest level since 1982.
The Grand Palais, the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre Museum closed for several days to secure their collections—which was bad news for galleries that had been suffering from a decline in visitors since the terrorist attacks on 13 November. Against all odds, none reported significant water damage.
The situation was particularly dramatic for the Louvre, which stores a quarter of its collection underground near the river. At one point during the flood, the water was rising by four centimetres an hour. At 6.58 metres, sewage would start to overflow, with dramatic repercussions for the museum’s Islamic art gallery and several storage rooms. Five hundred staff volunteered to work day and night to move the collections upstairs.
The National French Museums Laboratory, dedicated to the scientific analysis of works of art, had to transfer all of its equipment from its store under the Louvre courtyard. (Its precious particle accelerator, too heavy to move, is all that remained on site.)
To make matters more difficult, expert predictions based on the 1910 flood proved unreliable. The Louvre staff thought they had 72 hours to move the museum’s endangered collections after they received an alert that the Seine had reached five metres. “Actually, the water rose so quickly that we had only 40 hours,” says the museum’s director Jean-Luc Martinez.
The staff also had to contend with contradictory instructions from the local authority, or préfecture. At one point, the Louvre was asked to put works back in storage. Hours later, they were told to remove them again. “We had to adapt to a constantly changing situation. Fortunately, the flood stopped a few hours before reaching the critical level,” Martinez says.
Other institutions were not so lucky. The Girodet Museum in Montargis, along the Loire Valley, experienced the worst fallout because the local council had decided to place the entire collection in a basement during construction work on the main building. Works by the French painter Théodore Géricault, the Baroque master Francisco de Zurbarán as well as plasters by the 19th-century sculptor Henry de Triqueti, among other works, were damaged.
Martinez believes the ordeal is further justification for his controversial plan to move the Louvre’s storage facilities off-site in 2019. The museum is building a massive facility in Liévin, a small city 200km north of the capital, despite complaints from some curators that it will make the collections too difficult to access. (The complete transfer of works is expected to take at least four years.)
Although Louvre staff managed to successfully relocate works from the Islamic gallery and 90% of its Greek and Roman sculptures, the paintings department could only move half of its stock before its deadline. The Eastern antiquities department was able to relocate just a third of its most vulnerable objects (less than 2% of its on-site holdings).
“Of course, we could be relieved to see that we were able to move 50% of our stored paintings,” Martinez says. “But what of the other half? We certainly don’t want to see the Renaissance paintings floating on the water, as happened in Dresden and Florence.” He questioned what would have happened if the waters had risen as quickly over the weekend, when the museum was understaffed and the metro and bus lines had shut down.
The Louvre is now reviewing its emergency measures and plans to pack all artefacts in storage to facilitate faster transport. More works are also due to join private facilities that the museum rents on the outskirts of Paris. Meanwhile, everyone is hoping the Seine will remain calm until the opening of the new superstore in 2019.