Museum Disasters Series

Watch Recording:  YouTube
Recorded: Friday, March 20

Hayes Scriven will share his experiences and important lessons learned from both a lightening strike to the property and a wildfire that threatened both the Split Rock Lighthouse State Park and the historic Split Rock Lighthouse in his presentation Disasters, They Happen.

Hayes Scriven is an experienced museum professional with a history of working in the museums and institutions industry. He currently is the Site Manager for Split Rock Lighthouse located within the 2,200-acre Split Rock Lighthouse State Park on Minnesota's North Shore of Lake Superior. In this role, he manages all operations and facility maintenance. One of his passions is photography that focuses on landscapes and astrophotography, based on the North Shore of Minnesota.

Watch Recording:  YouTube
Recorded: Monday, March 17, 2025

Todd Topper shared his experiences from Fall of 2012 when an 8" water main failed under a North Denver off-site museum storage facility. This broken pipe resulted in extensive flooding and an exterior wall collapse. Todd will discuss how preventative measures in warehouse storage system design and emergency response procedures -- as well as some luck -- prevented a complete collections catastrophe.

Todd Topper is the Senior Manager for Collections at the Minnesota Historical Society. Since 1995, much of his work has focused on collections management and registration. The work has taken Todd from his hometown museum in Evansville, Indiana to Atlanta, Georgia, Denver, Colorado, Columbus, Ohio and now St. Paul Minnesota.  Within collections management, Todd specializes in storage systems, vault design, and large collection relocations. He recently assisted the Ohio History Connection with their new collections care center design and object relocation planning. When not thinking about museum storage solutions, he is a landscape and still life painter and collage artist.