Re inquiry about museum damage in LA from last week's quake:
 
Natural History Museum main facility has a few new cracks, but seismic
retrofit of original 1913 building and major additions (built at roughly
20 year intervals since) helped eliminate any structural damage. We were
closed until Friday, pending engineering evaluations, but all is go now.
History collections fared OK.  No breakage discovered yet. One storage
area (off-site) had a broken pipe but heroic early-morning action by
two collection managers staunched the flow and no serious or permanent
damage resulted.  Science collections and branch facilities offer
slightly less rosy reports, but in all we are in good shape, or will be
as soon as we stop holding our breaths!
 
Matthew Roth
[log in to unmask]