On the night of December 7, Michael Porter responded to a voluntary evacuation of Toro Canyon by driving into it. This was three days into the Thomas Fire, which is still only 60 percent contained, has destroyed about 800 homes and, at 272,000 acres (as of Wednesday morning), is fewer than 2,000 acres from the largest fire in California history. Porter, the acting director at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, went to the home of a museum patron in Toro Canyon; the patron was in Paris at the time, but his extensive private collection of art was not.

“We called him and said, ‘We’re going,’” Porter recalls. “He happens to be a friend, so we have a key to his place. I made a video of all the walls. We were on the phone with him saying, ‘What works do you want taken out?’ He was calm. People go into a zone of calmness, like, ‘O.K., we’re doing this evaluation.’“

Santa Barbara, Montecito, and Ojai, located about two hours northwest of Los Angeles, are home to a large community of working artists, wealthy collectors, and celebrities; the latter two groups often live in secluded million-dollar mansions in the hills around Los Padres National Forest, where dry and overgrown brush has fueled the blaze. Porter and his team—who are also removing M.C.A.S.B.’s current exhibit of Guatemalan art from three separate locations in the area— were able to rescue part of four separate collections, and move them to purified, closed rooms at his museum. “It’s not a service that people pay for. It’s just community,” he explains, adding that several area institutions have rescued pieces, most of which are being held inside the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

S.B.M.A.’s director, Larry Feinberg, estimates the institution is currently safeguarding millions of dollars worth of art from homes in the area. “We sent out a kind of fire rescue squad in a van,” he says. “Some people gave us as many as 25 works, and some just gave us a few. Everyone who asked us, we were able to help.” S.B.M.A.’s major Greek and Roman sculptures are currently out on display at the Getty, which wound up in the path of the separate Skirball fire, but which was never ultimately under threat due to its extensive (and well-publicized ) fire-protection design.

Feinberg had his van and crew ready to go this month, after being forced to improvise during the Tea Fire of November 2008 (which burned 1,940 acres and destroyed 210 homes in Montecito and Santa Barbara). But the most prepared art-rescue team working in Southern California is actually from Illinois. In addition to restoration and packing and shipping services, The Conservation Center in Chicago specializes in disaster response. The Center’s national clients include corporations, museums, nonprofits, and private collectors, and the response team is trained to triage a variety of situations, most notably flood and fire. This year alone, the 36-person team has responded to hurricane damage in Houston and Miami, and rescued or restored 1,350 works from a Georgia museum damaged by a tornado. Now, the fires. “I’ve been with the company for 29 years, and this is definitely unprecedented, to have these things happening so closely together,“ explains Heather Becker, C.E.O. of The Conservation Center.

Her team started receiving calls from SoCal during the first week of December, when the Skirball fire threatened Bel-Air. A team flew out and has been stationed in Venice Beach since then, responding where needed. Typically, Becker explains, “We go in early because a lot of local resources get zapped up quickly, even getting hotel rooms and access to vehicles and supplies.“