 Very hello again, and thank you for joining us for today's webinar. This is the seventh in your eight-part series to complement the in-person training for the Seattle Heritage Response Team. These programs are made possible through the generous grant funding support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. We'll have our final program in two weeks' time on salvaging wooden and upholstered furniture. After that program concludes, I will email you all with your record of webinar attendance. Please make sure that you have completed viewing all eight programs before the next in-person training session on Thursday and Friday, November 1st and 2nd. Before we begin the presentation, just a quick refresher of technical notes. On your screen, you'll see several boxes, including one labeled chat on the left-hand side. As with past programs, you can use this box to say hello and ask questions, share any information and links that you'd like. If you post a question there in the chat box, you'll receive a written response from me, and then I will collect all programs to verbally ask them of Randy at the conclusion of the program. Today we have a resource posted there in the web links box at the bottom of your screen. So as with past programs, just click on it to highlight it in blue, and then click the browse to button to visit that site. And with that, I'm very pleased to introduce you all to today's presenter, Randy Silverman. Randy has served as preservation librarian at the University of Utah's Marriott Library since 1993. He teaches workshops on disaster planning for the Western States and Territory's Preservation Assistance Service, aka West Pass, and is recognized for his national disaster recovery efforts. Randy has 80 professional publications and has presented professional lectures or workshops in 30 states and 13 foreign countries. He was awarded the American Library Association's Bank Harris Preservation Award in 2013, received a Fulbright Specialist Award in 2014, and was given the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters Gardener Prize for Outstanding Academic Contributions in 2016. Randy is also a member of the National Heritage Responders and has shared his depth of knowledge with that group for many years now. And with that, I'd like to turn things over to Randy for his presentation. Thank you very much, Jess, for your kind introduction and for all your hard work for getting teams on the ground in North Carolina and for everything you do. You're a fabulous resource, and we're all grateful. Good morning, everyone, and I'm going to just pitch into this. So the bottom line is there are natural causes and man-made causes for disaster recovery, and I'm going to talk about storms to begin with. This is a picture of Hurricane Katrina, which was a 2005 hurricane that totaled about $125 billion in damage. This is a picture after Hurricane Iniki in Hawaii in 1992, which was about a $3 billion storm. And they keep coming, of course. They keep rolling ashore. This is a tropical storm in Houston in 2001, and the law library filled up with water. And whether or not there is water attached to the immediate disaster, sometimes there are other things, there are fires. There often are incidents for us all to be concerned about with wet material. And so the place I'm going to begin is with the process of dealing with wet material. This is Colorado State University's Morgan Library in 1997, which the first floor went underwater and remained underwater for 24 hours, and about 425,000 books got wet. And it was a surprise to people. It was sort of unforeseen, but things happened. And of course, if we stand around wondering why these things happened, the mold follows. This is a picture in Biloxi after Hurricane Katrina, and that's kind of the inevitable. So we're up against a time constraint. That's not to suggest that anyone should put themselves at risk or become harmed or put anyone at risk because of the situation. But calm minds will prevail. So we want to think about prioritizing our recovery effort. What do we want to deal with first? And the bottom line for me is, and this is a personal assessment, I suppose, but when you've got coated paper, the coatings in some cases will stick together, and that may be a problem that cannot be overcome. So the nature of coatings on paper, so think about Time Magazine, just slick papers in general, is some of those coatings are water soluble. And so to prevent them from sticking together, we have a couple of options. One of them is to slip sheet a piece of material in between the leaves of the coated papers so that they won't have a chance to adhere as they dry. That can be a sheet of silicon release paper. Wax paper works less well, but it will suffice. Sheets of hollytex work wells, hollytex being Pellon are interfacing if you're at the fabric store. But the trick is that they have to be separated. We don't know which coatings are going to stick when they're wet, but some of them may. And so it's a problem. And differentiating which materials have coated papers, early in the process is a key. Some books have images that are printed on slick paper, and it's just a little section of the book, and it's in the center of the book. You may not notice it on first pass, but if you miss the fact that those were coated sheets and the books get a chance to dry, the coatings will be the first to dry in, and it's irreversible when they block together. With microfilm, the theory is that once it's gotten wet, we have to keep, again, separate the microfilm from itself, or it will adhere to itself. The coating in the case of microfilm is gelatin, and that's an adhesive. So when it gets wet, it swells, and when it dries, it'll adhere to itself. So keeping microfilm wet, and taking it back to a vendor who produces microfilm and running it through the machine again that originally produced it, is one way to dry microfilm. It actually can be rolled out and air-dried, but it's gonna be tricky to have a place to do that just because of the dimensions of microfilm. And photographs all told are going to... Oh, look at that. My voice cracked. Is that exciting? Photographs all told will adhere to themselves. So if you have a box of photographs, it's not unlikely that some or all of them will block together. Simply separating those out while they're still wet on any surface. Here we see a table that's been lined with paper, but they could be on the floor as well. We'll prevent them from sticking together, and that's a major step if it's possible. So knowing something about your collections in advance is helpful. Often you get called in though to help people, and you don't know their collection. And so figuring out what's going on and being able to apply logic to the recovery process is a way to go. If to be efficient in terms of space, photographs can be dried in... Let's see, I'm trying to get to my pointer here. We can drive photographs in a stack. And let's see, here's the pointer. Let's see if that will work. So yeah, there it is. So what we have is essentially a board, which just represents the bottom of the pile. Blotter, which can be any absorbent material. Blotter being absorbent paper board, but it can also be newspaper, for instance, or paper towels, any absorbent material. A photograph in the center of this, or a number of photographs, and with the image face up, and then a sheet of hollytex or pellon on the surface of the image so that it will not adhere to the second layer of blotter and a board on top and a weight on top of that. And so the nature of this assemblage is that you can stack things up vertically. Here we see a number of book jackets. They got wet when the books got wet, so they were separated from the books and they're being dried between sheets of blotter, this being the blotting paper that Jeff is holding there, and with a sheet of hollytex on the top of the dust jacket. So that the coating does not adhere to the blotter. If you don't know which side is coated, for instance, both sides of a dust jacket could be coated, or in the case of a photographic negative, it may be difficult to differentiate between the coated side and the uncoated side. Just put a sheet of hollytex on both sides. And again, hollytex is available as pellon from your local sewing store, and you can buy it by the yard, it's available. So let's see if I can make that go away. Okay, so we basically create a stack and we can build it up fairly high. The blotter will absorb the water out of the photographs. So if we leave this stack under pressure for some time, several hours, maybe when things first got wet, and then exchange the wet blotter for dry blotter and recreate the stack and keep it under pressure, the water will continue to come off either the photographs or the coated papers and it will dry in time. Basically, it'll take three or four exchanges of blotter and or newspaper and or paper towels to get this material dry. So that might be a priority if we can figure out how to deal with the coated material in a collection. Packout indicates a decision. If we're in a building that got wet, the question is did the one room get wet and can we work within the building to take things out of the wet room and dry them within the rest of the building or is the building itself so wet that it would make no sense to try and dry anything inside. So we're going to have to remove things. Removing things from a building puts things at risk. You can damage material by moving it around. Things can get stolen because they've moved into a non-secure area. So it is a decision. This is Colorado State University where 425,000 books got wet, as I said earlier, and they were removed from the library and taken to freezers where they were stabilized. And so the trick was to get a standard paperboard box and standard size paperboard box and line it with a black plastic garbage bag so that it becomes a watertight container and then packing out all of that wet material and taking it to a freezer. Noting where the material came from within the space, there were hundreds of thousands of books. So it's not possible to identify which book was in which box, but the boxes were taken out sequentially from this entire first floor that had gotten wet and so there was some sense of where the call number ranges happened within that floor. So things could be tracked while they were frozen and prior to freeze drying. Things could be moved to a temporary building. You can create one. They could be moved to a different part of the building you're in or to a different building on campus or in town. And we can work with things better in a dry space. But freezing is the great secret. If this is unknown to you, this is a wonderful secret. This is a wonderful asset. We can slow down the process of mold forming by freezing material. And in fact, if we get coated papers frozen before they have a chance to start drying out and blocking, they can be dealt with in a frozen state more effectively than trying to interleave all of these pages that were wet and with, say, Halitex or wax paper. So freezing can be done in a chest freezer like this. This is Yuri Palomchensky at the Czech National Library after the 2002 European floods. This is the British Library's cold storage unit where they actually can flash-freeze their books. They have enough wet material in the British Library or it happens frequently enough that things get wet, that they installed a flash freezer in the building when they rebuilt the building, the new building. So it's a wonderful thing to be able to fall back on freezing. And again, timing is very critical. How many days or minutes or hours will it take to move X amount of material into another space? If you only have 50 books, you can dry those. And I'll talk about that in a moment. But if it's a huge number of books that are wet all at the same time, it really makes sense to slow down the process of trying to dry them by just stabilizing them in freezers. And commercial freezers work great. This is the material from Colorado State University inside those boxes with the black plastic garbage bags lining them. And they're put into these pallets and it's a commercial freezer. So things are kept stable and you can pile them up as high as the ceiling. Notice that they're frozen peas on the right side of the slide. So it's a commercial freezer in use. And those books were molding. It took 14 days to pack the books out of the first floor of the Colorado State University Morgan Library. And after day three, things started molding and progressed all the way through day 14. So I asked the freezer manager, what did he think about moving all this molded material into his food handling facility? And he said, ah, I'm not worried about it. The peas were sealed up before they came in here. But I never eat frozen peas without thinking about that guy. So the drawing techniques I'm going to describe are beginning with the simplest, are five different techniques. And this is related to a grant that I worked on with folks from the British Library and the Czech National Library and some folks around the U.S. We got a grant from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training in 2004 to compare drawing techniques and figure out if one was actually preferable to another in terms of the outcome for the books. So air drying is the technique most commonly adopted because it's readily available. We just have to separate material and spread it out and wait for evaporation to happen. This is in Biloxi in after Hurricane Katrina and Gary Frost and I are busy drying out material that really has nowhere else to go except to be air dried. So we're spreading out books and things were starting to mold in Mississippi as well. But the bottom line is the sooner we could air them out the quicker they would dry and the mold problem would be eliminated. In fact when we got to this university library the librarian was busy bagging all of the books as they molded so he put them in a black plastic garbage bag and tie a knot to keep them from infecting the rest of the material. That's that logic is based on a weak understanding of what causes mold and I'll talk about that in a little bit. But spreading things out will allow air to pass over material and it will evaporate if there's enough air flow and this was in a place that was very hot and humid following Hurricane Katrina yet things were still drying out if we created air flow created fan movement of air it really helps. And so again we're spreading out all materials that were wet and allowing the air flow. This is in my lab some years ago notice the fan on the bottom of the photograph that's very key to the process if we move the air past the books it allows for evaporation. Notice that there the books are being held open by vellobinding combs which have become a rare commodity but it used to be pretty common and it's nice to be able to hold the book open so the fan can reach the wet material at the back of the fold. And as I said you can dry a whole lot of books the question is what's your limit where are you comfortable with the process of allowing things to air dry and when is it uncomfortable? There's nothing to preclude you're drying 100 books or 200 books today and maybe that'll take four days to get those materials dry and freezing the rest and then taking those out of the freezer after this lot is dried and pressed and exchanging them for more wet books. So freezing is not going to do anything to dry things it just allows us to stabilize them and it buys us time. So books can be preferentially dried like this so the boards are drying and large heavy books can be held open like this so they're supported and we're not trying to stand them up to sustain the weight on the binding which makes it more difficult to do that but the secret to all of this is paper expands when it gets wet and it shrinks some when it dries but especially machine-made paper does not return to its original shape so it will be larger than before it was wet out which is what's going to cause cockling the nature of cockling is a physical response to the fact that the paper the tension in the paper was kind of released the paper was made on a machine and it was formed under tension and when it got wet things started to expand and then they'll shrink again but not completely so if we can dry a book and then apply pressure to it we can minimize that distortion and so here's a picture of pressing books that have been wet and air-dried and after several days we'll squeeze books in a press overnight and then open them up to allow air to circulate again the next day and we'll continue to vacillate back and forth between air drying and applying pressure until we're convinced the book is totally dry we don't begin this until the material is dry to the touch meaning I can put my hand in the back of the book and it's cold because of the water content that's still in the paper but it is not physically wet so we'll wait until there have air-dried to a certain stage and then start pressing it and then we'll air-dry it some more and press it the next night and squeezing it overnight will not cause it to mold and will help with the distortion it will not cure it but things can be dried in a variety of ways and here we see things up on a clothesline or on the surface of a table getting framed material out of the frame is a great idea because the frame will trap moisture and so if we can eliminate that trapped moisture and expose things to the air things will air-dry if people are not familiar with how framing works learning on wet material is really a tough way to learn because the material is more fragile turns out that there's lots of ways to attach prints and photographs to mats and many of them are horrible and include tape and dealing with those issues while you're learning to unframe things is the wrong time to do it so it would be a good idea to learn about framing beforehand and it might be a great idea to get people involved who deal with framed objects and are familiar with the process of taking frames off of things but again just getting air to move will create a drying scenario this was a flood this is the result of a flood that happened at the archives of Ontario some years ago and the material was dried in town through dehumidification inside an abandoned grocery store so here we see large dehumidifiers that are operating outside the building and putting very dry air like 25% relative humidity air inside the building and the way this works is with a desiccant wheel and so the nature of a desiccant is like that little white material that white thing that they put in the pill bottle to keep your vitamins dry so that's a desiccant which is a salt that is going to preferentially absorb moisture out of the air so a desiccant dehumidifier has a system that pushes air through a rotating desiccant wheel and which will strip out the moisture from the air and the process also includes a heat cycle that redries that desiccant wheel so that it continually operates and can be used to put dry air inside of a building this is Colorado State University after that flood in the basement so the three floors above the basement had to be dried so that the humidity downstairs wouldn't cause this building to mold and the whole building is hermetically sealed and the air conditioning system failed when that flood happened so that dealing with the wet problem the moisture problem in the air throughout the building is also a concern and mold is going to occur if the conditions are right which includes moisture in the air this is inside of that grocery store in Ontario so papers are being taken out of the archival boxes spread out on these kind of rickety screen drying racks the air is being moved all through the building and it's 25% relative humidity air so things are drying out nicely and they put them back in folders and put the folders in boxes and send them back over to the archive and things work out this way it was very effective and in addition to paper they were drying cassette recordings and negatives the idea of pinning a negative to the image like that is not so great but you get the idea you can dry a variety of media these are sound recordings a real to real sound recording so in this experiment that we were doing with the grant money from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training we used thermal drying just to see what it did to the material because it was the technique that was used in Florence after the Florence flood of 1966 and so in the Czech Republic they came up with a place that was being used to dry lumber and so they got access to it and we dried books in a thermal chamber which basically just shuts material up inside of the chamber and adds hot air and circulates it and the lumber dries out essentially and in this case the books were dried out the books are being stacked between ceramic tiles with holly techs separating the book from the tile so the covers when they had water soluble adhesives impregnated into the cover material didn't stick to the tiles so the door was closed and the heat was turned on and we dried that stuff and I'll show you a slide at the end of the sequence of five drying techniques and two sterilization techniques that we experimented with to show you how they came out so I'll keep that in you know I'll keep you in suspense for a few moments if you will so vacuum freeze drying is the technical choice that is most commonly used for drying masses of wet book material and also archival material and this is a vacuum freeze drying chamber that was actually designed and built by Kirk Lively seen here in his younger days from the back and Kirk is busy putting a bunch of books into this freeze drying chamber Kirk runs Belfort in Fort Worth, Texas and is a good friend to the library community when it comes to trying to deal with disasters so he built this chamber out of it's basically a huge steel box with ribs that keep the chamber from collapsing on itself when he pulls a vacuum the books can also be constrained in the freeze drying scenario which will help eliminate distortion in the paper this however will increase the drying time significantly like by 50% or more so it will raise the cost of the process but for valuable books this is recommended so the chamber is closed and a vacuum is pulled and inside of a vacuum if you add actually everything inside the chamber was frozen before it was put inside so the books are frozen but if you put them inside of a vacuum chamber and pulled a vacuum they would eventually freeze in that state anyway so in a vacuum the water cannot exist as water so it's below the triple point of water and so it will turn to ice a small amount of heat is added and that causes sublimation to occur so basically the ice crystals are turned to gas and expelled out the back of the machine to dry the books inside the British Library they have not only that flash freezing flash freezer but they had this little vertus vacuum freeze drying system and they figured out that they could put a jack inside there to keep things squeezed nice and tight which allows the books to dry flat and they can put metal plates between the books to try and give some stiffness to that drying process and so the books are closed up inside the chamber they pull a vacuum they sublimate the moisture out every couple of days they'll open it up and of course with the ice sublimating away it's not so much there's not so much pressure anymore so they take a look at the books put them back in and jack up the pressure again and dry them under pressure until they're dried vacuum packing is an interesting system in that the process is to put the book inside of a bag with absorbent material that will draw the moisture out of the book and then the bag itself is sealed and so when it's sealed it pulls a complete vacuum inside of the bag so that pulls the bag very closely around the the book and where there's dry newspaper in there the water from the book will travel into the newspaper by capillary action and as the newspaper gets wet the bags are opened again and the material is the wet material is exchanged for dry newspaper or whatever you're using for drying and the bag is resealed this takes a lot of time in that you have to replace that drying material about 20 times however things dry really flat it's kind of an ideal way to dry books in that there is pressure and the water is being extracted at the same moment so if you squeeze things to hold them flat and extract the moisture at the same time things will dry very flat I should note I can hear Gary thinking in the background but you're not mentioning blocking again from before I mentioned the idea that if the papers are coated papers they have to be separated so we can't use any of these systems you can air dry books that have coated papers you can vacuum freeze dry them so if you get them frozen before the paper blocked that will work vacuum freeze drying actually works pretty well there I've seen a couple examples of things that actually block together and it's it's not clear why some adhes- some papers contain material that acts as an adhesive that just it's the way it is and some some don't some coated papers that would block together normally can be freeze dried and they will not stick together this system requires pressure and so in fact if it's a coated stock paper it you can't do it to this to those papers until they're dry so for instance you could air dry a book up to the point that there was no longer active moisture in the paper and then put it in this vacuum freeze drying or sorry vacuum packing system applying the pressure from the vacuum packing to remove the the remainder of the water and to allow the book to dry under pressure the interesting thing about this system is that it removes all the all the air so in fact it is a vacuum and mold will will not grow inside the bag as long as it truly is a sealed vacuum the vacuumy press is a very inexpensive version of the vacuum packing system vacuum packing machines are expensive like $10,000 or more the vacuumy press is like $300 so it's a little a little version it doesn't really do as much for the material in that it can't apply a true vacuum but it works pretty well keeping the bag sealed is a trick that blue line has to be as the machine pulls the air out of the bag that blue line is rubbed and the bag holds together and as long as the seal is not disturbed it will apply pressure to the book and the water will travel out of the wet book into the newspaper by capillary action but the seal sometimes breaks and so some of them don't you know you think it's done but actually it's not really sealed so there's a sealed version and so while we were doing all of this experimentation the checks were busy inventing the multifunctional vacuum chamber to actually address the material that was flooded in the Czech Republic and that's what the machine looks like it remains the only example of this technology in the world as far as I know it's really a fascinating machine very the development of the machine is a phenomenon the people that that did it are extremely bright so they used they call it lifelization but it's a vacuum vacuum pulling system and the books are kept upright in this kind of a rack system separated by unglazed ceramic tiles and they're put inside the chamber in a frozen condition and they're separated by these these little spacers on these tiles you can see the ice crystals at the head of the book and we're in America we want to know if the chamber itself maintained a vacuum during the entire process the Czechs want to know the exact drying condition of every single book in the chamber at all times so they track every book as they dry it and they can pull out the ones that are dry first and and leave the others to continue drying and so they seal up the chamber and pull a vacuum and in that machine they can do various things if they want they can pull a vacuum they can also just circulate air so they actually can air dry stuff in the machine and they can circulate sterilization material inside the machine ethylene oxide so it's a pretty phenomenal machine in the background is Barclay Ogden you can see the gray-haired goat tee that is the guy who began West Pass and was our fearless leader for 10 years right Gary so sterilization we experimented with two different approaches ethylene oxide and gamma radiation and there is there's some kind of misinformation about these so I'd like to touch on the idea of sterilization for a moment sterilization should never be entered into casually it of course is going to introduce some major changes to the material but in the book world or in the archives world it's possible that it could be a requisite option for instance when there's flooding if there's standing water in a community or in a building it is not unlikely that it will cause sewage to rise and so the water may be contaminated with sewage or other materials and if there is a health risk to handling the material after it's dry that would certainly be an occasion to start considering the option of sterilization so this is an ethylene oxide chamber owned by stereogenics ethylene oxide is used in industry for things like sterilizing catheters and stents and wound care dressings so the variables in ethylene oxide sterilization include the time up for the exposure the temperature and humidity of the material being treated and there's a pretreatment step to control for too much humidity and then the concentration of the ethylene oxide in the chamber based on the size of the ethylene oxide chamber the question about off gassing is where people get really nervous so the ethylene oxide process what includes preconditioning of the material the sterilization process itself and aeration which meets OSHA specifications for workplace safety and as I described above it's used for things like stents you know if you're going to put a stent in someone's heart you can be absolutely certain that there is no ethylene oxide left in that stent period that it's used for wound care dressings so the off gassing process is very carefully controlled and it it does not linger in books people who have had things sterilized by ethylene oxide are worried about the odor that's contained in the material and it is not ethylene oxide it is probably residue of the material that was in the book for instance dead mold will stink some kinds of sewage and and other byproducts of the flood will have a an odor that may be long lasting so ethylene oxide is one of our options and the other one is gamma radiation and this is a picture of a commercial gamma radiation setup also the slide is from stereogenics and what is used is radio isotope cobalt 60 as the energy source and this kind of sterilization is used for pharmaceuticals and horticultural supplies and medical devices and cosmetics and so you see the results of these kinds of processes the sterilization process in our world the the you know we're consumers downstream of sterilization which is a large industry in the U.S. with gamma radiation the technical variables include how much time is in the cell and basically what's happening in this picture is there are containers that are going to pass by the radiation source and so the amount of time that is that this material is in contact with the isotope load is one of the variables and the density the material is another and and this is controllable by the product conveyance speed so we can we can sterilize material fairly easily using gamma radiation but there's some some downsides to gamma radiation so we'll visit that here in one second physically what was happening with those drying techniques can be compared with machine made papers each of these books was produced in the 1940s and so we have machine made paper and as you can see the air dried paper can be controlled in the drying process by squeezing it between drying phases fairly well vacuum-freeze drying is going to leave what people consider an acceptable amount of physical change physical distortion thermal drying things were dried under that under some pressure those stacks of books were pressed by concrete blocks and there's some distortion the vacuum packing it came out fairly flat and the vacuuming press came out flat as well with handmade papers the drying result is better all all across the board but you'll see with the thermal drying in the center the discoloration in the paper thermal drying is cooking that paper and so we get physical changes in the material in this case the sizing in the paper is being baked out of the paper it's evaporating out to the edges and discoloring in the Florence flood the thermal drying process was very damaging so there's no question it's not an optimal way to go but notice these are all handmade papers these books are were printed before 1800 so they're all handmade sheets and the air drying looks very good and the vacuum freeze drying looks looks much better frankly and the vacuum packing and the vacuuming press come out equally flat so thermal drying dry stuff but it cooks it and so by cooking it it degrades the material physically and so the testing we did was basically stressing things physically to find out what the changes were in the paper strength and what we found was the 1.0 line that yellow line is completely non-damaging so that would be a complete success we found that we were trying to use and this is maybe an error in judgment on my part in that we wanted to use real books in the testing but I was committed to the idea of actually figuring out what are real books going to do and I don't want to get too carried away trying to create surrogates so we use real books but that created noise in the data so there is a variable in the data outcomes that couldn't be attributed to that to the variations in paper that we were able to use for the tests so air drying is essentially a non-damaging technique in fact they're all non-damaging until we get the thermal drying which degraded the paper strength by 20% and gamma radiation which degraded the paper strength by 25% and ethylene oxide comes out like a champ non-damaging so it's notable that when we cook things either by heat or by radiation it degrades the cellulose in the book and causes physical damage that's irreparable and so if you're choosing to use a sterilization material it's important to note that gamma radiation will have a long-term impact if you're sterilizing records for instance they have a seven-year life expectancy and then they're going to be culled from a collection seven years will not show up as a problem and that would be gamma would be simple and it would be expeditious and a little bit less expensive possibly than ethylene oxide but if it's long if the material is designed for long-term retention for permanent retention I cannot recommend the use of gamma radiation sometimes we're dealing with either fires or soot as a result of a fire and so this is a a fire that happened in a library in Colorado this is an arson related fire the upper floors of the building had fire sprinklers in them fire suppression the bottom floor did not and in fact that's where the arson set the fire so that is you know it was known at that point what was going to happen if they started a fire in the basement and so after a fire the result is evidence of soot on all material and soot is not dust it's the byproduct of the uncombusted material that went through that came through the fire the fuel for the fire and it includes everything it can include you know carpet and adhesives from the carpet and the paint and everything else and so soot it does not act like dust but it acts like an adhesive actually after a while and it bonds harder to material the longer it sits in contact with the material and it if you touch things while they're in a sooty condition you drive the soot into the material so it's it's important to try and remove soot expeditiously this is a the result of a fire that happened up in an attic in Severe County Utah which is about two and a half hours south of Salt Lake City the fire was caused by a welder's torch and the attic burned but the building itself did not catch fire so there was material in the attic that burned but the soot filtered down over the entire collection so all of these county record books were soot covered so everything smelled of soot and these are all covered with soot which is hard to see but in fact we're dealing with the premise that we're going to have to remove it the standard way to remove soot is to use a natural rubber sponge and that's what was used to clean the rest of the building but we tried an experiment we used something called dry ice misting which is a process of taking dry ice and putting it in one of these dry ice blasting machines or dry ice misting machines which grinds it up grinds a block of dry ice up about the size of sugar so if you think about a sugar crystal that's about the size that this will come out of the nozzle and dry ice is extremely cold the gloves are essential if you touch this stuff you can't get it off of you it will burn you and stick to you but because it's so cold when it comes out of the nozzle and this is a difficult slide to read but if you look at the top of the nozzle especially in that little bit of shadow from the building next to where we were doing this outdoors you can see it looks a little bit gray and so that's what's coming out the dry ice is being ground up the size of sugar and it comes out in about 15 or 20 pounds per square inch so it's not under a lot of pressure it's coming out and it's preferentially freezing the surface of that book so the soot is getting extremely cold very quickly and the pressure from the nozzle is actually then distributing the soot off of the surface of the book so what you end up with is a clean surface and in fact the dry ice can get into nooks and crannies at the head cap for instance and around the edges of the board that are difficult to reach with the sponge so it produced a very good result we were pleased with the outcome it can be damaging it can act like a sandblasting system if your dwell time is too long or the nozzle is too close to the material being cleaned so having an expert at the who's handling the dry ice misting process itself is very useful so mitigation of mold I would like to touch on the fact that mold is not well understood and it's a constant issue constant because in fact it's part of the living species on earth as you can see from this diagram the fungi represent about three and a half percent of the living species on earth where insects are over 50 percent and the animals are about 20 percent and plants are about 20 percent so the fungi are definitely here and they're not an afterthought it's not an accident and it's not a crisis that we're having fungi they exist for a very specific purpose which is to help keep the planet clean so it's part of the cleansing system of the planet and when these microorganisms activate it's for the purpose of consuming things that in the natural world seem to be dead or deteriorating and therefore it's part of the cleaning up crew so the insects do that for us they will consume the dead horses and the buzzards are part of that crew and the molds and so the triggers for mold activating include having a food source which in the case of libraries can be books and documents the amount of time that the food source has been at the right conditioning meaning that it's very humid typically and then the environmental controls themselves how warm is it and how human is it and you know that we well we think we think of mold as being really active in a place like the tropics and it's nice and warm and it could be really moist but there's also such a thing as having mold grow on the applesauce in the back of your your refrigerator where it's been sitting for three weeks undetected and so after a material sits in an environment long enough there are enough species of molds and there there are hundreds of thousands of species they operate in freezing conditions in temperate conditions but the general trigger the consistent part of this puzzle is humidity so things tend to be moist when we're going to have a mold problem so if I could anthropomorphize mold for just a second think of it as a living critter right as a presence this is the Biloxi Public Library where Gary Frost and I went three weeks after Hurricane Katrina and we went inside this building which is at this point very moist those are pine needles that washed in or blew in to the building and the water is drained off it's three weeks after the storm but that's about a foot and a half of pine needles on the floor maybe more and the windows are a little bit broken out so we're walking around inside this place it's squishy like a mattress it's kind of an interesting environment and there's no mold inside of that library at all except this is a picture of an exhibit case that's a glass exhibit case up off the floor it has metal legs and inside this case which is only about eight or ten inches deep there are baskets and the baskets are gray because they're completely covered in mold that's a hard picture to take it's there's no lighting inside the building but those are gray baskets because they're completely engulfed in mold where the building itself had no mold so think about the condition we have it's the same building inside their rear book area which was just a little sequestered closet essentially you have map cases and we open one of those up and you know it's doing a basic home science experiment inside there it's just growing mold and rusting and going to town and in fact even inside of file cabinets that were keep they kept archival materials in we found this example of a book that was inside of a Tyvek full of Tyvek envelope and it's molding like mad so inside of that container it's it's growing mold right next to this there were little booklets just like that one in paper envelopes that were not molding so if you know if you think about the model of air passage it gives you an idea that the Tyvek envelope is causing a lack of air flow that glass case is causing a lack of air flow and it is I think one of the critical factors if you're going to control for mold creating air flow is essential it's like it's for the mold if you'll go with my image of anthropomorphizing it for a moment the mold is differentiating between the living and the dead and its job is to consume the dead and if the object in question appears to be living which may be that's it's even so simple as showing evidence of air flow air movement the mold doesn't really feel like it's their time yet it's not theirs but the dead stuff that applesauce in the saran wrap at the back of your refrigerator after three weeks it's fair game right so there's a cutoff point time is critical for the for the species to devise whether you know divine whether or not it's it's that's lunch or it isn't and once it gets activated it will go like mad so the trick is going to be closing up our buildings to further water intrusion when that's possible and moving air when that's possible and actively moving it with fans is certainly a great idea sometimes we don't have electricity so here we're back in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina recovery and we're just opening up windows of this tiny little museum it's a historical museum to get air flow through the building to minimize the incredible mold growth that was going on inside and you know when we left the team that came after us told us that yeah they'd close the windows back up again told them that they were really concerned about looters and meanwhile the mold just went nuts so the movement of air this is a park ranger feeling a cave's breathing hole right the the nature of air movement in caves gave me a clue about this you know when was the last time you saw a mold outbreak in a cave it just seems like there's enough that of an and a cave can be extremely wet I've seen lakes inside of caves and stalagmites and stalactites are formed by dripping water inside of caves humidity can be 95% inside of a cave and yet it's not a mold outbreak just because it's wet because I think the air flow is moving and we can create so with that little museum in Mississippi we created cross ventilation just to start moving the air through the building we can also do that what's called the venturi effect if we can create a large space and have a little space it creates air air flow it drafts the air like a chimney so removing mold it's pretty straightforward in library world we wait for the material to dry out the mold becomes inactive and that's the secret to mold if you get the conditions correct when they're when the conditions are correct the mold will start to form and if we dry the material out sufficiently the mold doesn't feel that it's the right environment anymore and it will stop actively breeding or or surviving living and consuming those stains on that paper are caused by the mold itself digesting the cellulose so what's left is desiccated mold bodies on the surface of the paper and those can be removed with the HEPA vacuum cleaner and you can do that work inside of a fume hood if you've got one because even dry desiccated mold spores are will affect some people it's remember it's it's dead mold that they inoculate you with when you get a penicillin shot but if you don't have access to a fume hood going outdoors and just brushing the mold away from your body getting in in you know so the mold is is going downwind of you so it's not back up in your face and just brushing things off and removing the surface desiccated material in in the library world that's usually what we'll do we often don't treat the stain that's left on the paper when the stain on the paper belongs to a rembrandt that's different and we may deal with that print in the the visual problem can be corrected but it's or improve let's stop there improvement but it would have to be sufficiently important to want to go to that length usually we just accept stains from mold or from water damage as part of the historical evidence of the life of this material so policies can be put in place and I don't actually know what kind of things you've done in Seattle or in Washington generally in Utah we did something for the state's emergency plan by creating an annex to that plan under the emergency support function 11 ESF 11 which addresses cultural property and so in the state of Utah we're concerned that when we have a major community wide disaster that people will lose sight of the historic materials or the artistic materials and and focus strictly on human life recovery human life recovery is absolutely the first priority but it we cannot forget that the cultural material is going to be damaged the longer we wait to try and stabilize it the worse it's going to get up to the point that it may not be recoverable so we've added this annex to the state's emergency plan and of course hope we never have to use it so prevention I'm coming to the end of my time I'm going to run a little long your Seattle your special so I've created a couple extra slides for you but first I want to just talk about briefly the the concept of the Florence flood and what did we learn this is the an after shot from the Florence flood from 1967 the flood itself is 66 the publication came this was published in national geographic a few months after the flood and here we see a bunch of conservators crouching down in a hallway hovering over vellum books vellum is animal skin it's a hygroscopic material meaning it can change shape based on relative humidity in a room much less being submerged underwater all of these books were wet all of these books are now interleaved and and lying in this hall and people are scratching their chins this is the before shot unfortunately I don't have the after shot but what I believe is none of those books look like that today that they all distorted there's severe damage as a result of this stuff getting wet and the question I have is when you're a city like Florence, Italy and it floods every hundred years historically why would you store a hygroscopic material of high value any any one of those books is a $50,000 object and up why would you store vellum below the waterline in Florence it's just a question but what I think is every generation that has this event happen remembers that we don't want to do that and it will not be below the waterline today but eventually people kind of forget a few generations on it's it's an idea that is you know not taken as seriously and so things get shifted around and storage in the basement is a mandatory thing to deal with and so stuff gets put back down there vellum to dry it we have to dry it under tension to actually get it to dry flat so things are humidified and stretch like this to take one of those books apart and stretch it would itself be a massive undertaking much less a whole hallway full of those books that last slide was a conservation nightmare so what do we know about prevention well this is a picture of a hope chest from 1770 and what we see is a box which gets valuable material up off the ground the box would generally be stored at the foot of the bed which is in the human comfort zone and the lid is not going to fit on tight it's just a wooden box with a wooden fitting lid so there's going to be a slight amount of airflow think of that cave scenario so we've got it up off the ground a little bit so when there's standing water hopefully it will be sufficient that it doesn't get wet notice that that's about three inches which is what standard shelving in libraries is raised up off the the lousy sentence shelving in libraries is as a standard raised up off the floor about three inches so this is an an interesting idea in that we can think about protecting things in physical barriers from water and within the human comfort zone they'll actually travel through time very well granted the box is acidic it's a wooden box but people that use hope chests knew not to put the the wedding dress or the christening gown directly into the box but wrap things carefully and put them away inside of the hope chest so we can do that in in library world or archives world or in any collection when we think about our storage we think about can we package things such that it will travel through time fairly well I've seen a box like this an archives box directly underneath a broken pipe and the box shed water for some time and yet when you know we took the you know the water ran for 40 minutes and so the material when we salvaged the box was wet inside but not soaking wet it was it was pretty wet but three feet from the box that was directly underneath the pipe break things got splattered and were damp but were not soaking wet and three feet more on the shelf things were not damaged at all so the boxes themselves will take a hit and provides a barrier from direct contact and boxes come in all shapes and sizes and it's a great thing to try and protect the collection which brings me to the last piece which I inserted just for you guys because Seattle is an earthquake zone so in a seismic zone what do we know right well this is the earliest example of an earthquake resistant structure it's Iranian and fourth century BCE and it's a tomb and the idea of setting the tomb on that substrate that strata of rock was that the rock itself would move and react to the earthquake and spare the tomb and it's lasted for low these many years and so it's possible they got it right in modern buildings we'll see the use of these cave races to stabilize buildings so then in fact the earthquake will shake the ground the building will shake but not not torque so much that it physically falls down they're good for minimizing that so we're starting at the outside you know the biggest size and moving inward so the building itself can be stabilized of course this is expensive this is an isolator that was put underneath the city county building in salt lake city and the theory is that these isolators will move when the earth shakes in salt lake city because we're in a seismic zone here and the building will not move and so we hope that that actually is true inside of the building moving inward so at a smaller level if we have all of these stacks available to us when we were renovating the building we wanted to brace them to the concrete path of the building so the stacks will move the building will move but they won't fall down which means that people won't get crushed between the weight of the steel and the books on those shelves so it's for human life safety but I'm interested in protecting the material as well which takes me to the story of the egg carton the way eggs were moved in the 19th century and prior to that was to layer them between folds of an egg blanket and draw the eggs to market in the back of a horse-drawn wagon the idea of the egg carton is not developed until believe it or not 1911 and it happened in rural western Canada just above you so it's it happened because the farmer was bringing his eggs to the Aldermere Hotel in a rural town and the farmer considered breakage part of the deal he was moving his his eggs to the hotel to sell them and he thought of the the breakage as being part of the expense of moving them well but the hotel basically said we're not going to pay for breakage and so there was a standoff that was settled by Joseph Coyle who's the founder and operator of the interior news which was a newspaper in nearby Smithers, British Columbia and so Joseph Coyle thought about the problem and came up with what was called the Coyle Egg Safety Carton and this is a great model for us thinking about moving stuff through time when we have Rocky roads ahead right so the the Coyle Egg Carton basically isolated the egg and minimized its contact with other eggs and there and works pretty well to this day prior to Coyle no one thought about the cost of you know protecting eggs and today you don't think twice about buying eggs at an egg carton and taking them home that's just a built-in cost and we all accept that it took Coyle many years by the way to actually get the egg carton up in running and popular it took like the rest of his life but it did catch on so when we're thinking about the most fragile material that we own what can we do in advance of an earthquake to protect it so in this case I'm worried about glass plate negatives and lantern slides which were you know found in my library in boxes like this where it's glass to glass stored in little drawers that are sitting on shelving and they're going to fall off of the shelving when the building moves because of the earthquake and the shelving rocks back and forth and that whole box is going to hit the ground and they're all going to break so the idea of protecting them made sense because in essence not doing anything about seismic risk is accepting the reality that you were going to get breakage and so the question is Jerry Padani put it well what can you envision living without because in fact you may be making that decision by not taking action so what we did was purchased steel doors to put on the face of these normal shelves these are just bookshelves but we added the doors they were about $800 a pair and they're a fasten to that the book shelving and then each of the glass plate negatives or lantern slides was put in a paper folder which was put in a foam padding and separated from the other glass in this box the boxes are standard archival size boxes they're they come the glass plates come in different sizes and archival boxes come in different sizes so we can act accordingly so we'll pad these things out with an inert foam padding and then we're building something that will sit on the shelf and house this it's part of the system and it's made out of coroplast and so we've measured this to fit the shelf exactly and now we're creasing it and folding it and building this container that will sit on the shelf and it will have a closure of velcro which is being attached there and foam inside of it so the glass plates are going to float inside of a padded space and so that's being configured a little bit now we see Frank putting the foam inside of this coroplast enclosure which is measured exactly to fit the shelf and the glass plates are stored between these foam padding this foam padding and closed up and then each of those containers is closed with the velcro but of course that doesn't keep them in place the doors have a locking system on it you can see in the very front of that slide the black thing that is part of the locking system and that can let's see if I can do this yep boom so this lock system right there has to be kept in a locked state but that puts a metal rod up inside of the steel frame of the shelving and so the the glass plates are not going to rock around our papyrus collection was stored in these map drawers and so we put it inside of foam packing but of course it's not really enough so what we decided was the papyrus should be separated from the other papyrus mounts these are just standard glass mounts for papyrus that are taped at the edges that's the way they came to us and so the boxes are configured like a puzzle inside of these drawers and the extra space is taken up with coroplast or foam so that they won't rock around so there is no motion to rock these things when the earthquake happens the drawers are going to lock and the case is bolted to the floor with we have some NASA rocket models the president of the university of Utah went ahead went on to be the head of NASA for a couple of terms and on his death we got these models including this seven and a half foot tall Saturn rocket model you know it's a handmade NASA piece pretty interesting as an object so we put it in this this container this is like a gantry system we've got supports around it that are made of foam and covered in cloth and that was designed to strap to the supports that are holding up the floors of the building so in theory the the building is going to move and that rocket's going to move with the building but we hope it's not going to fall over and become damaged um nearing the end here this is um a seismic shock cord which was developed by a company called tribe one in late in Utah to help us out with a problem of keeping glass objects these are framed objects on the shelf and they're easily removable that was the secret of what they had to develop how do you fasten that to the existing shelving and they're inexpensive and the last thing I wanted to mention is the idea of mounting paintings and framed works so that they don't fall off the wall and sit in the water if they're broken pipes after an earthquake so the key to this system is this T screw and quickly you must know about this but libraries are kind of slow to come to some of these things so consider it a discovery from our point of view but it will be a three-point hanging system and the two top pieces are going to attach to the wall on a hook and the bottom one is adjustable so that it can be locked inside of a plate on the back of the painting so that it can't be stolen easily it's a security system as well as a seismic preventive system so that's what I know about trying to prevent breakage in eggs and with that I think we're done so do you have any questions and thank you very very much for your patience that was a long time it was wonderful thank you so much Randy especially grateful that you took the time to put together some content that was specific to this group so thank you for that we did have one question come in and I would encourage you all to go ahead and type any additional ones at this time but when you were discussing dragging techniques earlier Randy Corey was wondering where would you find the kind of vacuum chamber that you would reference the vacuum chamber is if you're on a campus they often have them for really small units exist on university campuses so you might find things in Seattle that I'm unaware of but I mentioned Kirk Lidley and Belfort before and Kirk is my go-to person Belfort is an international company that has offices in various places around the country and in Vancouver and they have two or three vacuum freeze drying chambers and so certainly that's an option to contact them and inquire about the pricing and the time it would take to freeze vacuum freeze dry material is that an adequate answer or and and Gary can help you with that Gary is is familiar with Belfort and their services didn't see oh okay there's I saw Corey typing a follow-up okay so she's wondering if you could go over how to protect responders protect themselves for example when to wear masks if there are outside flood waters involved should we always assume the water is contaminated should we rinse everything in clean water before packing out or air drying oh boy that's a complicated question you know the the answer is it depends when when we're dealing is it Lindsay who asked the question Corey sorry Corey that's a great question there are a lot of variables and when we're dealing with unknown factors it's likely that we're we're probably that there are going to be things that are occurring that are unexpected I like to equate this to you know my office on a good day is it's friendly to me I have pictures in my office that I are you know family members I have candy bars in the drawer for you know my three o'clock slump and it's a place that I feel really comfortable but after a building-wide event it's likely that the comfort zone of my office is not actually what it was prior and it's possible that in fact that it's dangerous so we want to take great caution in jumping into a situation where something is as as major is for instance an earthquake has happened and you guys know that better than anyone because you you get some earthquakes out there with regularity and so what was a friendly building may no longer be a friendly building what was grounded wiring for instance could have been disrupted in the earthquake and it could now be that the wiring is not grounded things can change the floorboards on a dry day and a small historical society might be perfectly sound and when things got wet it weakened something and maybe one of the stairs is actually unsteady at this point and if you step on it you'll break it and or you'll slide off it because it's slippery so you know there's mud layer on things and so things can be risky not just wearing a mask but in every every way things can put you at risk so being cautious about getting in harm's way is a great idea going inside of buildings should be something that's done with thoughtfully so after the you know the water has been pumped out going into a building being aware that things have been disturbed is a bright idea some people have no business going into a disaster zone after an occurrence maybe they're not in good health maybe they've been sick maybe they're mostly depressed and they really it won't help them to go into a really depressing situation if they've got a lot of attachment to the way the building used to look because it doesn't look like that now and so being really kind about defining or going in teams makes perfect sense so protections it may be that you're dealing with a post flood or a post fire and wearing protective clothing like boots and and overalls certainly a respirator it's not uncommon for buildings to contain asbestos asbestos was stirred into everything for up up until I think the 70s it's really late and they were they were mixing it in with it's in ceiling tiles it's in floor tile it's in I've seen it in my building it was stirred into the concrete of the building itself which means if the building itself was compromised i.e. a car drove into the side of the building and we all rushed in to see if the driver of the car was okay the the stuff in the air might contain asbestos and as long as it's bound up in the concrete of the building it's not a problem but as soon as it's it's free-floating asbestos breathing that stuff is absolutely hazardous and so and a dust mask isn't good enough that's not fine enough for the kind of problem that asbestos provides so we need actually fitted respirators and to wear a respirator you need to be tested and the respirator needs to be sealed to your face so it actually makes contact with your face so you actually don't breathe the asbestos people after 9-11 rushed in and of course they would rush in it's heartbreaking to know what happened to them when they did that they breathed all kinds of stuff from the the building dust and it absolutely caused health risks and I remember people saying no don't worry that's not going to be a problem they actually said that and you know days later two and three days later and years later there were the lawsuits began that were there was you know there's a huge amount of damage that was done because of people being good samaritans so certainly there's there's no reason to put you yourself or anyone else at risk and it may not be it's a kind of thing that a person who's unfamiliar with a disaster scenario should be exposed to there are professional recovery people available to do work like this and they're in and out of buildings with regularity I mean firemen run into burning buildings that's the craziest job in the world but they don't feel they're putting themselves at risk and often or not because they understand the variables and so there's a bunch of things that need to be addressed before getting into involved should it be should everything be rinsed and and you know these these are questions in the florist flood they asked the same questions 1966 should we be washing things everything was covered in mud but the reality was there's so much damage and there's so much pressure to try and save all of that stuff there certainly was no time to wash things in the moment if it's a small event absolutely that's a consideration and should be factored into other variables will washing in fact help just because it got dirty doesn't mean water is going to help it because in fact some media has got water soluble elements to it it may be that that getting it wet will cause things to run further and in fact leaving the stains in place is the best option but we don't know enough without doing a bunch of experimentation so it's possible that just stabilizing things by putting them in a freezer and then being able to take them out after things slow down and we can ask questions about specific media makes more sense certainly deciding things in a mass way on the fly is very difficult maybe you gave an answer to that using a phrase that several other presenters have used it depends so it's a familiar refrain I'm sure for those of you who've tuned into all of these seven programs to this point but I think query raises an excellent question though of just making sure that there's at least some awareness of what the incident was and what materials you're dealing with and Randy oh god and if I could just add to Cory's observation Cory you know the idea of having a respirator it's part and parcel with that team that that Jess is sending into North Carolina it's my assumption that all three of those people have respirators in their their backpacks where they're going and probably gloves and probably boots and you know it's part of the the equipment that you would want to have on hand I think well we're getting close to the end of our time together so I did want to make sure I shared the survey link so you all should know the drill at this point you could just go ahead and fill out that very quick survey monkey that helps us get some feedback on this program and I want to give a big thank you to Randy and this is such fantastic content you put together and especially grateful that you tailored it to the needs of community in Seattle thank you all for joining us today and we will see you back here in the meeting room in two weeks time for our final program thank you thank you very much everybody and especially Jess it's been a privilege you all have a good day take care