Three weeks ago Shabbat, a pipe broke and flooded the library. Thank you to everyone who wrote with advice, sympathy and encouragement. It all meant a great deal.
Hopefully, this will never haooen to anyone. However, what follows is a quick summary of what to do. Get as much water out of the space and books as quickly as possible. Labor intensive but effective is placing paper towels between the pages of books. The towels need to be changed as they sop up water. We removed from the room anything we thought was damaged and placed them on tables in an air conditioned room. Several people suggested freezing the books until you can get to them. We didn't quite do that but did remove what might be damaged and placed the books ontables in an airconditioned room. That did help us save some items. Dehumidify the area. Mold and mildew are real enemies. Unfortunately, despite my pleas, dehumidifying was delayed. By Tuesday mildew had begun to appear on the walls. By the time the adminstration admitted there was a real problem(over a week later) and called in a specialist in water damage, the mildew had spread. Regular room dehumidifiyers are not powerful eough to deal with large amounts of water. Insist on finding an industrial strength appliance which can pu;; moisture more quickly. All the bookcases had to be emptied and moved away from the walls, the lower half of several walls was removed, the carpeting was ripped up and the damage had spread to adjacent rooms. So the library is now out of commision for some weeks at a time when people are starting to use it for school, classes and to see new books. So discuss, argue, fight, insist, emphasize the serious of water damage, and ,more importantly, the threat of mildew and mold which spread more quickly than you can believe. Due to the responses from Hasafran, I had lots of eveidence and many suggestions. And it could have been a lot worse. We only lost a bit over 100 books because of the trajectory of the water spewing from the pipe. Thanks again. Hasafran is great. Aileen Grossberg Lampert Library Congregation Shomrei Emunah Montclair, NJ Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the AJL =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: Hasafran @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
