March
1, 2002
Staff
Goes beyond the Call of Duty in Response to Library Flood
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Photo: Fred LeBlanc
LITS
staff work to save damaged periodicals.
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If you're an obstetrician
or firefighter, getting calls to come in to work in the middle
of the night are expected. But if you work in a library, you can
pretty much count on sleeping through the night—unless you
have a new baby or a puppy, or, as Debra Morrissey found out last
Thursday, there's a flood.
Morrissey, assistant
to the College librarian, was sleeping peacefully February 21,
when she received a call at 3 am from MHC's Public Safety office.
She learned that as a result of strong rain, a drain at the bottom
of a stairwell located underneath the "copper bridge"
had gotten clogged, and water had backed up and run under the
fire door. Water then spread all across the third floor of the
Miles-Smith Science Library, leaking onto the second-floor stacks,
which were filled with science periodicals. By the time Morrissey
arrived at the library and slogged through some "big puddles,"
around 3:30 am, Facilities Management staff members Brian Clark,
Rich Chase, and Kathy O'Connor were already on the scene, "wet
vacs" in hand.
Electrician Charlie
Lydon, who was called in to deal with water that was leaking into
the lights, soon joined them. Fresh from a January staff retreat
in which Paul Ominsky, director of public safety, had discussed
disaster planning and what to do in the case of wet materials,
it didn't take long for Morrissey and Gail Scanlon, director of
LITS access services, to set up command central and get to work.
After emailing the
entire LITS staff to ask for help, Morrissey and Scanlon worked
with staff to remove all the damaged periodicals, more than three
hundred in all, from the stacks and brought them into the Stimson
Room. Additional tables, a number of fans, and rolls of paper
towels were brought in by Facilities Management, and as staff
arrived for their work day, they came in to help. "The computer
programmers, who come to work early, were among the first to arrive,
and it just went on from there," says Morrissey.
Peter Carini, director
of archives and special collections, arrived on the scene in the
early morning hours to assess how to best handle the wet materials.
Based on his recommendations, LITS staff, more than fifty of them
by the time the day was over, examined the periodicals page by
page, inserting paper towels between each page (up to five hundred
pages per publication) of the wet periodicals. Throughout the
morning, Facilities Management staff members were on the scene—cleaning
water off floors and shelves and digging up drainpipes to find
the source of the blockage.
Says Morrissey, "I
was thrilled that our staff responded so quickly and was willing
to do such a tedious task. The quick response saved 75 percent
of the publications, and they are now back on the shelves."
Other periodicals, she notes, are still drying out. Morrissey
estimates that between twenty-five and fifty publications may
be severely damaged. Many can be replaced, as they are available
online and from vendors. She is most concerned about the loss
of a number of copies of Landscape Architecture that date from
the 1930s, which were donated to the library and will be difficult
to replace.
Now sleeping easy
once again, Morrissey is looking forward to a meeting this week
that she has had on her calendar since the January staff retreat—the
subject is disaster planning, next steps.
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