Holy fucking hell
Big flood, almost killed 30 of my classmates. My best library buddy was down there when the water busted through the doors and filled up the basement in 8 minutes with about 10 feet of water, they had to break a window to escape. Library server destroyed, government documents and maps destroyed, computer labs and professors offices (with dissertations and current book projects) destroyed. Rare book destroyed. Our grades, exams, curriculum, homework, everything. The walls were coming down (the upper library survived) and the floor broke open with geysers.
I'm going to go down tomorrow to help salvage things, but the entire campus was based on the library server. Unless someone had backups of the cataloging files somewhere outside the library, we're talking years of work lost. We don't know when we may go back to class.
No air conditioning and a library of 300,000 books in flood conditions... there are going to be major mold problems that may set the library back a fortune. I can't even start to imagine the extent of this. I'm so heartbroken. I'm just glad it was on the weekend, so the cataloging department and others were closed, otherwise people would have been killed, because there are no windows in those rooms and no way to open the doors with that much water on the other side.
I *just* got an email about that via my library school's email list and I immediately thought you you. Here's a blog that has photos of the destruction: http://bamf.blogs.com/photos/october_flood/ While it is heartbreaking to read about the utter destruction, I am so relieved that you and everyone else at that school are safe.
ReplyDelete-rudbekia from RMC
Strikes me that no thought was given to the risks associated with storing so much intellectual capital in a basement - talk about bad planning and thinking ahead....
ReplyDelete1) this was the first flood in a century
ReplyDelete2) the library has been under renovations for the past few years to open a new wing to accomodate the surplus of materials
3) the "valuable" materials are all upstairs; there are just no expendable materials in a research library, and something has to go in the baseme (the rare books in question were the personal collection of one of the professors).
Rudbekia, it's so funny you linked me to that blog - I was just talking to the guy who posted it today, and I was meaning to look it up. Funny thing how blogs circulate, eh?
Sounds like *somebody* is going to get a whole lotta practice in bookmending, eh? :-)
ReplyDelete--Brooke