In “Flooding Damages Books and Records in Loussac Library’s Historic Alaska Collection,” Devin Kelly reports on flood damage to an archives. In this case, a pipe burst above the first floor stack area, causing massive water damage to one of the bookshelves in the Alaska collection as well as all of the books stored near the floor. Water pooled on the floor up to 2 inches, and much of it dripped through the floor into the basement archives, damaging some of the records there as well. Once discovered, library staff rushed to move books away from the flooding, and the Anchorage Museum offered to freeze them until they can be treated for mold. Luckily for the library, most of the books are easily replacable, so they can pick and choose what to throw out and replace and what to restore. Archives typically don’t have this luxury, as they usually contain the only copy of many records, and only have backups if they created them. Like all disasters, this one made me think about how to prevent it or minimize the damage afterwards. How did they allow 2 inches of water to accumulate on the floor? Given that this was discovered in the morning, I assume it happened at night and nobody was around. However, water detectors attached to some type of alarm system could have alerted staff much earlier, and perhaps saved more of the books. Certainly there would have been time to prepare the archives in basement before water got through. Also, keeping everything a foot off the floor would have minimized the damage better. A drainage system in the floor could also have directed water away and prevented pooling, although it would probably be expensive and not cosmetically pleasing. Finally, I would be worried about theft during the rescue process. When everything is in disarray and chaos, and staffers from all over the library come to help is when it would be really easy to steal something and go unnoticed. Hopefully, library staff would never do that, but there have been cases of insider theft from archives. However, there’s probably no good way to balance security with disaster recovery.
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