EDITOR’S NOTE — Last month marked the five-year anniversary of California going into shelter-in-place during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Herald is taking a look back at how Monterey County residents and organizations navigated that time, as well as the lessons learned.

As the weeks turned into months and eventually over a year of the world being shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic, aquariums, zoos, museums and libraries were left grappling with what to do.

Now, five years later, they are finding a new normal.

Navigating the pandemic

The Monterey Bay Aquarium initially closed its doors to visitors on March 12, 2020 and wasn’t able to reopen to the general public until 14 months later, in May 2021. Aquarium Executive Director Julie Packard said the pandemic was the biggest challenge they had ever faced.

However, the Aquarium was able to use the time as an opportunity for maintenance. “One of the silver linings of the pandemic is we’ve been able to do a lot of maintenance,” Cynthia Vernon told The Herald in May 2021. Vernon was the chief operating officer at the time. “We’ve been sprucing things up and I think some of the exhibits have never looked better.”

The Kelp Forest exhibit, for example, had to undergo major repairs right as the Aquarium was gearing up to reopen to the public.

“The original rockwork wall was created 40-some-odd years ago. During our closure at COVID time… a 10-foot section of this concrete wall fell off, cracked off and came smashing down to the bottom of the exhibit,” said Paul Clarkson, the Aquarium’s director of husbandry operations. Staff realized there was deterioration in the wall and they would have to replace it.

While aquariums would typically remove all of the animals from the habitat, drain the water and do the maintenance in a dry environment, the Monterey Bay Aquarium did the entire process underwater. “Most of it happened while we were open to the public,” Clarkson said.

Of course, there was still the more routine maintenance and animal care to be done throughout the COVID-19 closures. A limited number of essential staff, including members of its security, facilities control room and animal care teams reported to work as usual during the closure to maintain the building’s operation and care for the animals.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s volunteer divers also came in three times a week to clean the tanks, the San Jose Mercury News reported.As for animal care, the Mercury News also reported that the Monterey Bay Aquarium was the first aquarium to vaccinate their sea otters. They began vaccinating the otters in August 2021 and did the last round of vaccinations in November 2021.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium was lucky that none of their otters contracted the disease, but the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta announced in April 2021 that several Asian small-clawed otters tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Guests weren’t able to visit the Aquarium in person during the 14 months of its closure, but they could still get a look at the ocean life through the Aquarium’s previously established livecams and additional new virtual events.

Similar to the Aquarium, the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History emphasized their online features to stay connected with their community and donors. Susan Wolfe, the museum’s Director of Development and Engagement, said they kept in touch with members and donors through phone calls, annual reports and newsletters.

The Museum’s education team also came up with plans for making their resources accessible online. Liese Murphree, the director of Education and Outreach, said they did a lot of school programs remotely.

When they first reopened, the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History continued the remote programs for the first few months. “We have those archived and we now have those as assets, like little stories and videos of different natural histories,” Murphree said.

“We do have access to much of our collection in a digital format, so you can access photos and information about the collection,” she said. “We have a few other things like the video about this exhibit and a few other things that are still accessible on the website,” but don’t do remote field trips as frequently, doing one or two a year now.

The Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History also used the pandemic as an opportunity to remodel.

“We also took advantage of the closure, like a lot of restaurants did, to remodel, so we installed the whole exhibit upstairs, a brand new exhibit that opened in spring 2021,” Wolfe said.

“Because the building was closed, we could do a lot of work that we couldn’t have done if the museum had been open,” Murphree said. “It’s really hard to install an exhibit in a museum because you have to do it within the few hours that it’s closed, but we had weeks and months to get that installed.”

Wolfe also explained the museum was very fortunate to have to lay off just one employee during the pandemic thanks to continued financial support through grants and donors.

“I’m just super thankful that we were able to keep our staff intact because that allowed us to just hit the ground running with all of our programs and really be a resource for the community,” Murphree said. “We really see ourselves as an asset to this community and want to serve the community.”

Finding a new normal

“We were probably one of the first cultural organizations to reopen. We reopened probably six to nine months sooner than anybody else,” said Wolfe. “I think in hindsight, maybe we opened a little too early, but I think the staff were really keen to get back to work, be back together as a team.”

Similar to the Aquarium, the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History used an online reservation system so visitors could feel safe while visiting and know only a small amount of people would be in the museum at the same time.

“It just slowly grew over time where we were offering great masks, we were offering tons of hand washing stations and people just started coming back,” Wolfe explained. “I think people also felt that pent up frustration of being locked in their homes, so they really appreciated that we were open and we quickly built back our numbers.”

Wolfe said the museum lost a lot of volunteers over the pandemic, which was hard to rebuild but now they are back to pre-COVID numbers.

After the pandemic, the museum has also seen a shift in the audience it typically attracts with all of the programming they’ve worked on, like trivia nights and Science on Tap, a partnership with local breweries.

“I think we where we once had a lot of like senior citizen visitors, now we have loads of families and kids and things like that,” said Murphree, “and because we’re doing all sorts of fun events … we’re getting kind of this nice millennial crowd coming in for evening events as well. I think it forced us to rethink. We are a great community asset, and after COVID, we were like, ‘OK, how can we bring even more people into the buildings?’”

Brian Edwards, the Monterey Library & Museums director, had a unique transition into his role on the Peninsula, as he took on the position after the peak of the pandemic in August 2022.

He recalled the plexiglass still being up, no in-person programming and having to fill positions after a “number of layoffs here in the city.”

“It was like, how do you restore services when our hours have been cut, staffing has been cut and what does it look like now with a new model? What will the library look like in 2022 and going forward?”

Even now, Edwards said they still try to find a good balance between online and in-person library events. He explained that the library has to balance their digital users, heavy readers and people who want to have access to the library for the entire day.

Part of adapting to a post-pandemic model meant re-hiring staff, looking at on-site events and the bookmobile service. Edwards also looked at reworking policies for what the Monterey Public Library calls their cellarium — a small community room.

Edwards said he found that people needed more private spaces to take Zoom meetings or attend online classes. To meet this demand, he followed academic libraries’ lead and added privacy booths.

Edwards also listened to the community for what events they wanted to see return.

“You do things that are a lot of times what people have been asking about before. Like, you know, they’ll say, ‘when are you gonna return with ‘Pause to Read’ (program) and bring out the dogs and everything?’ So we’ve worked with a lot of our past volunteers and performers and then just started to bring those back slowly and then opened up the community room for public access again.”

While Edwards and the library try to meet as many requests from their community as possible, one of the challenges has been balancing the request to come back to pre-pandemic hours.

“My goal is to really invest in this site; have a lot of love and attention here. I think people love (this library), so that was like opening back up spaces,” he said. “There’s also a change when there’s a loss of institutional memory. We do have a lot of staff here that have been here a long time, but then also bringing on new staff. There’s this change of balancing different ideas; it’s just a fantastic way to work, too.”

Coming back into operation, the museums Edwards oversees had to do a lot of restructuring, he said.

“In terms of museums, we have displays that were aging and things that we were doing. So there’s a lot of things that we need to do moving forward. I think to me, it’s like the pandemic was that last chapter, and we’re just gonna focus moving forward to do our best to really engage with the public and serve the community as best we can.”

The museums Edwards oversees have reopened tours and expanded hours but are still not up to the same level of service they had pre-pandemic. “Part of it is we rely on a lot of volunteers; staffing was cut during the pandemic and so we’re just building back up and so it’s hard, but I think the interest is there from the community just to have spaces.”

Edwards said he is currently seeing a lot of people wanting the return of more events they can engage with from the museums, such as cultural art exhibits. “I think people really want that sense of community that comes from when you have community investment in community places.”

The museums Edwards oversees weren’t too affected by a lack of tourists visiting the Peninsula.

“I find that the museums that we have like the Presidio Monterey museum is kind of a hidden gem and the park is like a hidden gem,” he said. Edwards explained very few tourists go out and visit it, but it’s a lot of locals or people who were stationed at Ford Ord.

“I would say we weren’t affected probably as much as some of the others, like Monterey Museum of Art, or even Stanton Center because they’re in the midst of a change of what their content is.”

Instead, most of their visitors were actually young students on school visits. As schools started coming back and resuming tours, his team tried to work with them. Edwards said getting students from outside the area “is our tourism.”

The Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History shared a similar sentiment, with roughly 60% of their visits coming from Monterey County residents. Now they are less focused on challenges from the pandemic and instead looking to the future.

“You just have to learn to be flexible, adapt and I think we’re moving forward and moving past the pandemic to say we learned,” Edwards said. “These pandemics and endemics happen over time. So it’s like learn from the past but also just moving forward and how can we adapt? I think we’re going to be really positive moving forward.”