I intended to make this post much earlier, but life has gotten in the way and distracted me. It's still something that I felt I needed to talk about though, so, although delayed, here it is.
On August 28th, my area was hit by Hurricane Irene. The actual hurricane itself wasn't bad. The wind didn't do too much damage, and most people didn't even lose power for more than a few hours. There was moderate local flooding in lakes, ponds, and storm drains on the day of, but nothing that caused any damage. However, as the hurricane tracked north it dumped more and more rain into the rivers. The following day, a Monday, was when the flooding really crested.
Back in August my schedule at the library was still Tuesday and Wednesday, with the rest of the week off to work my other job. The Monday after the hurricane I hadn't heard from anyone at the library, and as the damage near me (close to one major river which hadn't crested beyond the worst that the spring melts had ever brought), I didn't think too much about how the library was faring.
It wasn't until I was talking with a friend Monday night and he mentioned that his childhood home was under water that I started getting alarmed. His old house was in the same district as my library. I tried to get on the college's site and check my school email for info, but nothing would load. Then I went on the local newspaper for the city and in the first picture I saw, up in the corner, was my college. Completely surrounded by water from the nearby river. In the article it stated that one of the college board members had said they "were trying to save the library, but it didn't look promising." I panicked. I didn't have anyone's home phone number, it was obvious no one was on the campus with that much water around it, and I had no idea what to do.
I finally decided to drive down the next day, after stopping at the store to buy a pair of barn boots, and see what I could do to help, see how my library was, and just try to figure out what I was supposed to do. When I arrived, I was confused to see that no one appeared to be there. I parked in a corner of the campus where a quarter-inch of mud on the pavement showed where the water had been, and walked around the side to the library building. I could see mud left on the bushes bordering the building where the water had crested. The parking lot, which is somewhat bowl-shaped, was still full of water—probably about 4 feet deep at the parking lot's lowest point. There were still at least two feet of water in the garage, which is in the basement of the library.
 |
| My cell phone photo of the campus parking lot. In the front you can see mud. In the back, to the left of center, is a pickup truck half-submerged. The campus buildings are off to the right. |
The door to the library building was open, so I crept in. The electricity was still off, but there was enough light to see that there was no mud on the floor of the lobby. The outer doors to the library were closed, so I opened one just enough to peek in at the library's main floor. There was no mud. No water. Everything looked dry.
As I closed the door again I heard voices and turned to find members of the maintenance crew and a security guard coming down the hallway. When I explained that I was a librarian and that I had come because I thought there would be someone on campus at least, they said that no one was around because it wasn't safe, and that I should go home and watch the news and they would announce when the campus would be re-opened.
I left, feeling a little silly. But at least I knew the collection was safe. I was relived, but the threat of what the damage could have been still left me feeling unsettled. What must it be like for the people who did lose their homes? And their libraries?
Over the next week the college hired outside contractors and a cleaning crew to fix up the campus. The water in the library's basement/garage area had stopped just six inches from the ceiling. Everything that had been in the garage was ruined—some machinery, old chairs that had been in storage, vacuums, spare vehicle parts. The library's elevator car had been parked on the top floor when the flood hit, but some of the mechanisms in the bottom of the shaft were damaged. A sink had hole also opened up in part of the parking lot and seeped water all day that ran across the pavement toward the storm drain. While I was at work I could hear the repair men and cleaning crews down in the bottom of the elevator shaft, grinding or burning away the mud, mildew and rust that the flooding had caused. Every few days we got the strong smell of some kind of caustic cleaning agent wafting up the elevator shaft and the emergency stairs as they tried to stave off any mold and bacteria.
A week later the remnants of tropical storm Lee blew through and the over saturated soil couldn't absorb the water fast enough. The campus flooded again. Classes had to be delayed again. The mud had to be scraped out of the garage and off the parking lot again.
Two weeks later a story in the local paper explained that the campus had sustained about a million dollars in damage, and it would still take at least another two hundred thousand to fix two elevators that were damaged, one of them being our library elevator. A lot of the money was coming from an emergency fund that the college keeps for just such occasions, but the problem with our elevators would cost more than the college had, so they were working with FEMA to try to get funds to fix them.
It's been two months now, and our elevators are still out of order. There was word at the beginning of this month that the repair men could arrive any day, so I spent a couple of days with our student assistants moving our special collections so that the repairmen could access the elevator shaft through the wall of the special collections room, but no one has shown up yet.
In the scheme of things, elevator repairs are a minor thing. Our collection was spared; the college was spared from massive damage. Meanwhile two streets over, people are still living with family members while they try to find the money to repair and re-furnish their own homes. Schoharie, the neighboring county, was completely devastated and lost large portions of two of its libraries' collection, and hundreds of people's homes were completely destroyed—including the home of my coworker's mother.
Hurricane and flood damage is so unusual for my state, no one quite knew what to expect, and the reality was devastating. Water gets into everything. It burns out the motors in hot water heaters and furnaces, it drowns the engine of your car. It leaves mud all over family photos, carpets, beds, clothes. For the people whose homes were covered in water, they lost everything. And as for the libraries, people immediately started volunteering to donate books but the libraries couldn't even take them because there was no where to put them. There still isn't anywhere to put them, as the buildings themselves are still in need of repair before they can even erect bookshelves or bring in materials that would be in danger of mold from the moisture lingering in the wooden studs of the now-stripped walls.
If you can spare a few dollars, please, consider donating them to one of the damaged libraries in Schoharie County, or to one of the Schoharie County hurricane relief funds. Links can be found below.
General relief organizations taking donations for Irene victims (from the Southern Adirondack Library System's blog)
No comments:
Post a Comment