 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event where a webinar, a webcast, whatever you want to call it. We're online every Wednesday morning here. The show is free and open to anyone to watch both the live shows here on Wednesday morning in our recordings. So if you are unable to join us on Wednesdays at 10 a.m. central time, that's fine. You can always go to our website and see the recordings of all of our shows posted there. They're just put up onto our YouTube accounts so you can watch them very easily that way. We also include, if there are any websites that people have mentioned, any handouts, slide presentations, all of that is included as well as you have a whole record of everything that happened in the show. We do a mixture of things here on the show. Presentations, interviews, mini-training sessions, book review shows. Basically, if it's library-related, we are happy to have it and present it on the show. And we have Nebraska Library Commission staff that do episodes sometimes, and we sometimes bring in guest speakers. And that's what we have this morning. Denise Lover is the director of Wahoo Nebraska Public Library, and earlier this year, it was just earlier this year, right? Denise, did this happen? Yeah, actually, yeah. January 7th. It was just the very beginning of this year. They had a little disaster, a little water disaster in their library that she's going to share with us what happened, how they dealt with it, and maybe have some tips for people if this happens to you at some time. So Denise, thank you. Welcome. Thank you, Kristine. I'm very happy to join you all this morning, and hopefully I will have something, even if it's just one little tidbit that someone can take away and if you ever have a disaster in your library, you will not maybe have to go through quite as much as we did, and you'll be on the right track. This is basically, we use our Facebook page to communicate with a lot of our library patrons. We have just a weekly newspaper that is published once a week, and unfortunately a lot of people don't read our local papers, so sometimes it's very hard to get information out there to our patrons, but we are exploring adding on a Pinterest page and maybe doing some other things. Now our Facebook page seems to work fairly well, and we're wahoo if you're not familiar with our community. We are fortunate to be kind of equidistant between Omaha, Lincoln, and Fremont, so we are considered kind of a bedroom community, as my husband who's on the city council likes to say. For a bedroom community, let's make it the best bedroom we can be. I think our library is a fabulous part of that bedroom. We built our library in 2005, construction started. We began fundraising about three years prior to that, and then we opened up in June of 2006, moved into the building, went from having just a little bit over 3,000 square feet to over 11,000 on the main floor, and then half of our building is storage and a lower level that has now two meeting rooms, the mechanical room, the IT room. We have a lift elevator to go downstairs, so it's handicap accessible. We have a beautiful building, never in our wildest dreams did we think that we would have something like this happen in a building that's even so new. So that's kind of where we will probably start here, and Kristin, you might have to remind me where to go. I'm still new to all of this stuff. You had some photos that were in, I think they were put into albums. Album, thank you. I knew that you were looking at it. It was perfect for me, and I think we're all in this time, let's see where is the Great Water Disaster. Yeah, actually, you just want to pass it, scroll up a bit, I just saw over there on the right. There it is. Yeah. All right, there we go. Okay. Yes, January 7th, 2014, if you go back, that farm can remember that it was right after the holidays, the weather dropped really bitter, bitter cold in Eastern Nebraska, I think it was maybe all over the state, but we were experiencing really some subzero temperatures that obviously had consequences far beyond our reach. This Tuesday, it was about 10 to 1 in the afternoon, and I was on my lunch break. I actually had taken a later lunch that day because we'd been down in the basement moving some of our holiday books. We cycle out the holiday books as they change holidays or whatever, special collections, and then it goes back to basement storage. We were in the process of moving some of the Christmas items back downstairs, and I was running a little late, so I left the building at about a quarter after 12, and about 10 to 1, my phone rang, and I had my code on ready to come back to work, and I was like, do I am the phone or not? Well, I better just encase. Well, it was one of my staff members, Carrie, my children's librarian, and she said, I heard a large bang, and now the fire alarm is going off, and I was thinking, okay, fire alarm, that's, we have an alarm panel out in our front lobby. Why don't you do the, do the third choice there, yeah, don't sell this message. Fire alarm going off, I'm thinking it's just the panel out in the front lobby, and I'm thinking, okay, sometimes that does go off with the trouble alarm, I'm thinking you might have this as something I can fix, and I only live two blocks from the library, so I'll be right there. Well, when I hung up the phone, then I realized I could hear the alarm, and normally if it's just that trouble alarm, it's just a beep, beep, beep, and you don't hear it. Well, this was big loud alarm, and I'm thinking, okay, that's not good. So I'm racing back to the library, scanning the skies, thinking maybe I'll see smoke or something, and I see no smoke, which was a good sign. I get here, the alarm is going off, I can hear it, the lights outside of the building are flashing, I come racing into the building, and I stop to look at the fire alarm panel, still thinking I can fix this problem, and it just said dry suppression system basement, and I'm thinking, okay, I'll just go down to the basement and see what's going on. Well, when I walked in, then I ran into the main library from the lobby, then by then the water was actually coming out of the vents in the ceiling, and basically it started, the first break was actually in our meeting room, which is over here behind this wall, is where the water actually broke, and at the time, we had no clue what was happening, we just knew that there was something major going on in the building, and so I told Carrie, my children's librarian, to call 911, and then I'm like, is there anyone in the building? And she said, no, the last little old lady had just walked out like five minutes prior, and I think it was, it wasn't the governor's mom, she came later in the parking lot and wanted to come in, and I'm like, no, sorry. So the water is gushing out back here in the children's area, actually, this is the area straight back. Denise, if you click on the photo, it'll make it bigger so we can see it. There we go. This is our children's area, and then this, when I came into the building then, this is where, back in here, is where I see the water coming out of the vents, and that was like, OK, something is really going wrong here. So we called 911, got out of the building, and waited out in the parking, and of course it's freezing cold out there. The sun was out, it was actually not, if you didn't realize how cold it was, it looked like it was a beautiful day, but it was sub-zero. We're standing outside, waiting, and waiting, and waiting. And I keep thinking the big fire alarm is going to go off, the siren for the city, to let everybody know there's a disaster, get here soon. Well, nothing is happening, and I'm thinking, great, no one's going to show up. Obviously they paged people. It's pretty soon that everyone just started showing up, the firemen come racing in, and they're like, OK, there's not a fire. And the worst part is, number one, I guess I would say, make sure, especially if you have a volunteer fire department in your community, make sure they know where your water shutoff valve is. Ours, of course, was down in the basement as the main water shutoff. I had to come back into the building and take the fire chief downstairs, because number one, he didn't even know how to get downstairs. Number two, he didn't know where the water shutoff was. And of course, in my muddled state by then, I'm like, OK, it's over on this wall, but I can't remember which one it is. And now it has a big tag on it that says, main water shutoff. So that's my first little tidbit, is make sure the people who will respond to your disaster know how to get into your building and where the water shutoff is. Because we probably have water run an extra 20 minutes that didn't need to run, because we couldn't get it shut off. So that was kind of a mess. I'm going to go back to my main pictures here. I can go back to the main album. Just click anywhere off of it. It'll bring you back. Like, go over to the side in the black area, all the way to the right. OK, all the way to the right. Gotcha. There we go. So I'm learning all kinds of new things here. Within 20 minutes, then, after the fire department is there, all my city workers guys are starting to show up. Because there is literally water coming all over throughout the library, through the ceiling, all of these things. But mostly, it stayed on what I call the south end of the library. So that was kind of a blessing. We didn't have any water up here in the back part by the staff areas, the surf desk. Nothing got wet up there, the computer lab. The only thing that got wet, of course, was all of our carpet. Every area of carpet was totally soaked. And because we had essentially 30 minutes of water coming into the building. This is later that probably the next day. But that afternoon, within about an hour, there was so much water gushing out of, because here's our meeting room here, where the break was. And so between this wall and this wall and children's, this is where all the water is coming through. And then this is where, when the ceiling collapsed, then this is the biggest chunk of the ceiling that came down. Luckily, no one was under that ceiling when it happened. It caved in. All the insulation came out. I'm not sure if there's a picture of that on there. We had one. It was a huge, huge mess. I'm trying to see. I don't see a picture of that, sorry. We had so many pictures taken, and some saved, and some didn't. The first thing that, within that first hour also, after getting the water out, and then the city guys coming, and they had brooms and squeegees and everything, just trying to get all of the stuff out of the building. I mean, it was literally up over my boots when I came back from the building the third time to help the fire department. There's main water shut off out of the street. And he wanted the key to that device instead of breaking it, because I guess in an emergency, it's called the PIV or the post indicator valve, and it controls the water for the fire department. Well, they can either break it to get into it, or they can use the key. Well, this fire chief just not to break it, because he knew he could get the key. So I had the key, of course, in my key box. And so that was my third trip back into the building while the water was still gushing out. By then, the water was up over my shoes, and it was really coming out fast and furious. But the city guys showed up. We started getting then, once we got the water shut off, and released it out of the system, flooded our parking lot, of course, with all kinds of water, and made a great big skating pond. But then we just started scooping it out of the building as best we could. The fire chief right away, he had obviously dealt with these people before, and so he recommended we call Paul Davis Restoration. And that's what my city administrator was on site within five minutes, because I said, Carrie, when we're standing outside freezing and waiting for the fire, I said, just go to City Hall. Tell them what's going on. Tell them we need more help. And so then my city administrator, Melissa, was here within 10 minutes. And immediately then, we got on the phone within the hour to Paul Davis, and their guy was here within an hour after calling. And they gave us excellent service. I mean, it was amazing how fast he showed up, and he was continually glued to that cell phone. I mean, he was constantly. So are they based out of Omaha and Lowe's? I think the way I understood him, they're like a franchise company, kind of like the service tech or serve pro or their steam masters or whatever they are. So they all deal with disaster cleanup. And they were getting inundated with phone calls that week because of all of the freezing. They had several major water breaks around the area. So when the guy showed up that was our rep that took care of us, he was on the phone constantly, lining up, drawing units, dehumidifiers, the help he was going to need to clean the building, all of this stuff. And it was just a constant. He was literally, I think he probably made 100 phone calls in an hour from our library. He needed to come out, of course, to see the size and how much equipment they were going to need. And they brought in, in this picture here's a good, they brought in their own power supplies. And at one time then, by the end of the day, the next day, I think we had 60 drawing units and 17 dehumidifiers running in the building to get all of, it's amazing how fast that water creates humidity. Within 20 minutes of the disaster, you could just feel your sinuses just filling up because of all of the humidity. I was amazed that that much water could really humidify a building that quickly. And we noticed right away, too, with the books, they started to wrinkle if they were getting damp. And so we spent that first, probably the first two hours then cleaning out the local history room, our genealogy room, that was one that had a lot of newspapers in there, one of a kind books that had been written by families and things like that, even though they didn't sustain any water damage in the room, but the carpet was soaking wet, and the building was getting so humid so quickly that we needed to get that stuff out of there. So that was kind of our first priority of moving, that's actually the first materials that left the building, and then the computers, and they just started packing stuff up. That, unfortunately, was a problem later on because, and God bless all the guys that helped us, but any of you who maybe dealt moving with men before, and I don't mean to be picking men, but they don't always organize like a woman would. Or a librarian. Exactly, or a librarian, and obviously we did have the time to sort and figure out, but they just started grabbing things and putting them in the back of pickups and taking them up to the city hall, which is just up the alley from our library, actually where the old library used to be, once we moved out, the city offices expanded and remodeled and took over our old space, so we were kind of back on the other side of what would have been the old city hall where the utility department was, that's where they let us take over and put things in storage and actually set up a temporary office. But in the meantime, the guys are just loading up pickup trucks and taking stuff away, and I have no clue where anything is going, and it's just getting thrown into boxes or the back of a truck and it's gone. So later on, I'm actually surprised that we pretty much found everything except the remote to the overhead projector in the meeting room. That's the one thing that made me elusive at this time. I have hopes that it's in a box somewhere. Then starting then, the cleaning company was there by six o'clock that night, and they were on site, Paul Davis people, cleaning up all of the trash essentially left from the disaster. They only touch building components. They will not touch any of the books or things on personal property on people's desks or anything like that. Carrie's desk used to sit, actually her desk is right here, and it sat right here in this little corner. Well, she took a pretty hard hit. When the ceiling collapsed, it destroyed a lot of stuff on her desk, took out her computer. This wall right here is where our children's computers come out. We have two or three long carols that CSI, Cornhusker State Industries, and Lincoln made for us, and those took a pretty hard hit as far as a lot of the debris coming out of the ceiling. You have that blown-in insulation, and then, of course, the water and just drywall and stuff like that. The computers, we only actually lost three computers in the whole disaster. One was one of our little kids' computers. We have one of those awe computers that was destroyed. The computer at Carrie's desk, and then one computer at the children's carols, was destroyed. So all in all, we weren't too bad on loss of computers, wasn't as bad as it could have been. We did lose the, also on this wall, we had two large cabinets that sat here that house our toy library. Those were damaged pretty heavily on top, and when Cornhusker State came in a couple of days later to evaluate our shelving, I had them come in and look at everything to make sure there was any damage that needed to be repaired. And obviously, there were several shelving units, like in our adult section here, that where the ceiling came down and hit, it took some little nicks and scratches and things like that. So they loaded up everything that needed to be repaired or replaced and took it back to Lincoln for that. They were really, we had so much great help from everyone who came, was very good about, this is a better picture of those computer carols, and you can kind of see. They're normally, they're like lined up against, they're pushed up against the wall tight, and then they're back-to-back units, and all the wiring sits down the, runs like a tunnel down the middle, and they're just all connected, but you can tell by that one there, it looks kind of sad, and lots of insulation on it. It was amazing too, how quickly the library not only were we in a disaster, but it turned into a messy disaster, because you had all these people coming in and helping, and things were just getting tossed and thrown and pushed everywhere, and so that was kind of a mess. Within the first 10 minutes too of the water coming out of the ceiling, I give great credit to my city maintenance crews. They ran and bought tarps, plastic, and came and covered a lot of these bookcases. So they probably saved a lot of our books by getting them covered. This is our children's area. They got the covered really, really quickly. So that made a big difference on how many books that we actually lost in children's. The bulk of the ones that we lost in kids here were from display books. We had a lot of our Christmas books still on display, and those were out on by the computer carols. We have a small display unit that sits at the end of one of those, and I think we lost every book on that unit, and then these were ones that we did a quick and dirty kind of handling of the books when we started to pack them up, and some of them, if they felt wet, were obviously wet. They got sorted out, and as you can see, we still had all of our Christmas decorations up and everything, because we hadn't taken down. It was only the 7th of January, and we still had the tree up in the children's area and a lot of the decorations. So not only did we have our regular library furniture and things to clean up, then we had all this excess stuff to clean up too. That was another thing that this disaster kind of brought home for me, is sometimes librarians can be pack rats, and we tend to save everything thinking, I won't have to spend money on that in the future, I might need that envelope or that box or something, and we unfortunately had a lot of extra stuff just sitting in storage, and when the water broke through downstairs in the basement, it obviously damaged, it brought a lot of water into the basement area that made a big mess too. So it just makes the cleanup more difficult when you have a lot of stuff. My other piece of advice would be, if you haven't used it in a year, just throw it away. It's okay to throw things away. I'm still fighting with my staff though, some days on that, it's like, oh, we wanna keep that, but this kind of shows just a different view of with all of the different drying units going to the PowerPoint, the power supplies, and again how messy, you know, they started to take down then the rest of the ceiling. This is after Paul Davis had come in, and even though it was a small area that we first lost, they ended up, a lot of it was wet, because the water had obviously ran and damaged more drywall. This area back in here is all like what I can, this is the Cirque area, the staff, this is our staff room back here. This was the genealogy, local history. My office is over here, and this was the computer lab. Those areas sustained no real structural damage, ceiling-wise or anything like that. It's just again, the carpet was soaking wet everywhere, so anything that sat on the floor, I had boxes of books in my office that I'd been stockpiling for like a craft project and things, and those were all immediately, you know, so pretty quickly, so I ended up just calling up our local recycling center and they came and picked stuff up for us. Some of our friends came in the next night, we started, well basically all day long, we started the next day going through all the books to find the ones that were wet, because obviously we wanted to get anything out of the building that was wet so that we didn't have any mold growing or anything like that. So that was a huge project starting the next day. I unfortunately wasn't able to help a whole lot. Thank God I had good staff and volunteers because I started to need to deal with the disaster. I was on the phone a lot trying to get things lined up. My city administrator probably did the bulk of the dirty work. I mean she immediately contacted the insurance company. She dealt with the restoration company most of the time. You know, the engineers that started to come in. That night Paul Davis brought in their own people to kind of evaluate the situation and to try to figure out what exactly caused this, what happened. The first mechanical engineer that came to the building that night, we were downstairs in our mechanical room where the fire alarm, fire system, the pipes are at, the furnaces, everything is down there. And he was asking me why didn't we get an alarm prior that let us know that water was in the system? This was a pipe in our meeting room that should never have had water in it. Only if there's a problem, should their water enter into the system. And we had no advanced warning on our fire alarm system. If we did not have it monitored at that time by an outside company, which when this mechanical engineer found that out, he wasn't real happy to hear that. He was amazed that we would spend that much money on a beautiful library and then not pay the extra, you know, minute amount to him to have it monitored. And he was exactly right. I mean, here we'd gone seven years and not had a problem. All of a sudden, you know, we would have maybe had monitoring. We would have been warned in advance that something was going on. But now, you know, he's looking at it. We're still trying to figure out, you know, what's the problem, what happened. And we had the company that normally dealt with our fire system. They came up and repaired the pipe that night. So they were there too and fixed the pipe so we could kind of get the, you know, that part repaired. Unfortunately, then we were without any fire protection system in the building. So we had no alarm. We had no, did not have any pipe, or, you know, the system itself was not engaged. In the meantime, then we were told that we needed to get everything out of the building within the next week, because in order for Paul Davis to continue their cleanup and get everything ready, they needed to have that building cleared. So this is where we're kind of sorting books and going through. These are a couple of our friends' members she's going through. Anything that was like a paperback that had been wet, we just immediately, we just pulled off the cover that had the barcode and the books went into a big garbage bin. We got those books out of the building right away. It was funny, the second morning a company in Texas called us on the phone and I don't know if they just monitor news services looking for, there may be the ambulance chasers of the book world, I don't know, but they called us right away and said they could save all of our books if we ship them to Texas and they would freeze them and save them all. Well, after we did a little exploration, we found out that it was going to cost quite a bit of money to have that done. I mean, it was like $1,200 just to ship them down there. We had, at the very end we ended up with 604 books that were lost, destroyed in the disaster. We took a lot of them, we actually took over to our local locker plant and put them in frozen storage over there in the meat locker and they were really helpful to let us freeze those books. That was one of our big projects. The next day was to try gather boxes. And so this here, these are the boxes we sent our maintenance people to Fremont and they purchased boxes for us. These were the perfect size because then we couldn't, like, one of the guys said you can't overload these. So we couldn't make them so heavy that no one could pick them up. So, and it was great that they had handles, they had lids, we could mark on the outside what was in every box and it did work out perfectly. We ended up, I think, buying, I don't know, maybe two or 300 boxes and then the restoration company supplied us with the rest when we did the actual pack out. This is where we're packing. This is one of the Paul Davis employees. These are the other boxes that we bought from the company in Fremont. These we just taped. And I still have a lot of those for sale so if anybody is looking to buy boxes, we have packs of 10 for $5 and they really are nice heavy-duty boxes. But it took us an entire day. They sent out their staff. They had, I think, three women and I had my husband's company, their construction company. They weren't busy at that time of the year so they sent us three guys from their company and then all of my maintenance crew and staff and it took us an entire day to pack out that building but we packed 1,100 boxes of books in one day. We even had help from some of the other librarians from around the area came in. I know Gail and Brian from the Eastern System came out. We had great help. I think here's some of the gals here, some of our volunteers that are, the children's area was a big mess. That was a lot of sorting in there and getting ready to pack there. Just, you think about how quickly when you need to empty a building that's 11,000 square feet, it takes time. I remember when we unpacked, how long it took us. It was bad enough doing an unpack but then to pack it all up, it was obviously a lot of work. Here's more of the boxes and you can see again the ceiling. We're kind of getting things moved back out of the way but these are the shelves right here that kind of took the biggest hit when the stuff came down and those were sent in for some repair. One of, I think two of the Carroll units here were sent in and the toy library cases, they are in the process of actually replacing because the tops were so damaged they said they couldn't repair them so they prefer to just create new ones for us. Here's some of the guys from Collins that are helping us. We were lucky, this cart here, this blue cart, we actually got that from our local dollar store. They didn't, it was broken and it was out in the alley and my maintenance guy here, Neal, and I had gone over to buy plastic totes and we saw one of the carts in the store and we're like, oh, that's a great cart. Could we borrow that? And the guy's like, well, no, I can't loan you that but I have one you can have if you could fix it. So my maintenance guy said, it's probably like a five or $600 cart that they gave us for free and one of our gas department guys was able to fix it. It just needed like a wheel welded and so now we still have that cart and we use it. I mean, it came in handy. It was a great gift actually. It worked out well having that cart. Again, lots of more volunteers packing up everything. My husband here in the red, he was good to have that day. He's minister organized and we were able to do it without killing each other. So that was a good thing. Remember, working closely with your spouse is not always a good idea. Then we go, some of our pictures we jump ahead to, this is our temporary space then. This is kind of some of our temporary. We're out on the sidewalk here. This was kind of the entrance obviously stairs. We were not handicap accessible then when we moved two blocks to the east of the current library to the Veterans Memorial Building. That was the only space available in Wahoo at the time. There was no other place available. This building previously housed the probation office and an alternative school. This area here is kind of just a small area where we took all of our movies with us and all of our audio books and then we took about, I don't know, 10th of our collection. We have over 33,000 items in our collection and we just tried to go through and that's another thing. It's like really hard. What do you decide to take book-wise? But people are gonna wanna read in the next. And we were told we were only gonna be out of our building for about 10 to 12 weeks is all it was gonna take to repair it. And that was from the insurance company. And at first they weren't even going to reopen us. And this would be another thing that you would wanna check on. Make sure that your library has what they call a continuation of services coverage in your insurance policy. We were very fortunate. We have our insurance with alarm, which is I believe it's like the League of Area Risk Management. They were great to deal with. My city administrator obviously took care of all of that on her end. But the first time I'd met with the insurance agent, he was hesitant to even reopen us though because he's like, well, you know, you guys don't bring in a lot of revenue. And I'm like, well... No, that's not what you know. Yeah, that's not the point of a library. We're not revenue makers. As someone told me once with your revenue takers, not makers. But I said, we really need to have our library open somewhere because we are the only public access point for people for computers, copying, faxing. You know, they need the library. We can't be closed for 10 weeks. Well, which, thank gosh, goodness, we had that continuation of services clause because we were able to open back up and then the insurance company paid our rent at the Veterans Building. They paid the rent. All of our shelving then that we didn't need, a lot of the bulk of the shelving went storage. And that, Cornhusker State was very helpful. They said it has to be in heated storage because you do not want it sitting out. First, they were thinking that restoration company would just bring in trailers and put it in the parking lot and store it out there. And the guy's like, no, no, no, it can't be out in the cold because whenever there's a temperature change, you're gonna have the shelving since it's solid wood, it's going to warp or it's gonna get damaged. So we were lucky. I go to a local coffee shop just about every morning to get coffee. And one of the guys there, we were talking about everything that was going on and I said, we're looking for a storage unit that has heat. And he goes, oh, I just sold one to this guy. Here's his number, call him and see if he'll run it to you. And he did. He just basically stored his camper there for the winter. Well, they were heading out to Florida for the winter and didn't need the space. And it was a perfect location. So we were able to get the restoration company then came in with big moving vans and they moved all of our shelving down there, all of the extra library furniture that didn't go to City Hall ended up down in this controlled storage unit. So that was very helpful. The shelving we did take with us to the veterans building. We took all of the, some of the shelving was all short stack shelving from the children's area. And this is the second, this room at the vets it actually had two sides. There was the main, when you walked up the stairs into the main area where we had like our surf desk on a table. We had four or five computers over there for the adults to use. And we had newspapers and our video audio collection. We had, then this area was all the books that we had available for both adult, teen and children. So this kind of starts out here with the kids books. And then we wrapped around and went over to teen and then into adult and even nonfiction. And we had some large print too. One thing about this area was this, at one time it was our University of Nebraska Extension office. So they had built a kitchen up here. So actually the staff really liked that because we're like, oh yeah, we have a kitchen. But this was intriguing for the children because we could be up here on top and we could jump off. So that was kind of a problem a little bit. That's why we kind of have everything blocked here so that we can keep those who wanted to jump off onto the space and doing that. Carrie set up her desk here. This is tubs that are full of, we had the toy library. We took out of those things and we brought the toys with us. They're all in those tubs. These are all of our board books in here. Few puppets, we did the best we could to make it look like a library and make it homey for the kids. And it worked pretty well. We lost a lot of our patrons only because we weren't handicapped accessible. So that was a big drawback for us. But really it was the only space available in Wahoo at the time. We could have sat for months without having a space to go to. So we were fortunate to find a space. I'm trying to think. Some of these pictures here, we were also on the list to host one of the sites selected for the hometown teams exhibit, which was a traveling Smithsonian exhibit featuring the topic with sports in America. And so we had applied for that grant and were selected as a site. And immediately we're like, oh my gosh, what are we gonna do? Do we not have it here? Do we try to hope we're back in the building by? We were due to take possession of the exhibit in April. Well, we started out thinking we'll be okay. Well, then we could obviously, we knew that it was not gonna happen. So we had to find another location. Our local museum, Historical Society, was kind enough to offer their space. They had hosted a Smithsonian traveling exhibit before, so she was very helpful and able to assist with that. This is the opening day of our exhibit. We had an open house there and kind of a kickoff. We had hot dogs and cracker jacks and all the things you would do at a ball game. So that was kind of, it was a great turnout. We had a lot of fun. We had some lunch and learned speakers. This is Andy Kendi. He's the sportscaster from Channel 7 in Omaha. He came out and did a program. His was very well attended and popular. We had a vintage baseball game at our local ball field. So we were still able to host the exhibit, keep it here in town. Plus we also got to collaborate more with our local Historical Society. So again, it was a result of the disaster that we were able to form new partners. Yeah, made new connections. That's what I find is really amazing about this, that no matter what happened, just chatting with somebody at the coffee shop gets you a new connection, help out with some things. So that's something that I think, I think we do a lot of librarians. We're always talking about our libraries and what we do there. And you never know who you might network with in the most unexpected place. Exactly, I know people laugh about, I talk about going to coffee every morning, but I'm like, I have picked up more library supporters, new patrons. Right now we run our holiday decoration sale. It's a big fundraiser for us. We take donations of people's unwanted holiday items, especially Christmas. And they're new and gently used. People that do the theme decorating and they're tired of it or whatever. We've been doing this for 15 years now. Well, last year I made a connection with the same guy who got me the storage unit. It's like, oh, my wife is cleaning out. I'll do anything not to have a garage sale. How much will you give me? We'll give you a receipt for tax purposes. You bring me the stuff and you get the ride off. It was fabulous. I'm there. And he brought us a pickup load of, and it was beautiful stuff. I mean, we're in the day two of the sale already and we've already made over $100 the first day. So it's the easiest fundraiser you can do. It's a lot of fun. People bring you the stuff. It's kind of like the goodwill. They bring you the stuff. You do have to sort it a little bit and clean out the bad stuff, but it's a fun fundraiser. So if anybody's interested on how we do that, you can always contact me later and I can give you more details. The pictures here with all of the, finally after seven and a half months, we were given permission to go back into our building. So then here we go, we're moving back everything. The restoration company moved all of the furniture back for us. The only thing that they would not do, of course, was bring up all 1,100 boxes of books from the basement. So like, okay, took us an entire day to get them down there. How are we gonna get them back up? Well, I can't remember whose idea it was if it was my city administrators or what, but she said, what about if I contact the two football team coaches and see what they can do? If they can do like a fire line type thing and we'll get the boxes up. And that's exactly what we do. We have a public school, high school in Wahoo and we also have a private school, Newman, Bishop Newman High School. She contacted both football coaches. Immediately they said yes. They had a practice that morning, so after practice, they said they would come to the library and help us with our return and to bring all those books up. And there is on our Facebook page, there is a video of that too that we shot, but we had, I'm not even sure how many boys there were. There had to be over a hundred. And they basically formed a line from, let's see if I can find a picture of how they actually kind of did it here, where they would have come up the stairs. Yeah, this is kind of a good one. This back area here where this door is, that's actually our lift door, but off to the side, that back area that you cannot see is the staircase to the basement. And it's two flights, a double staircase. And what those boys did is we lined up the meeting room at the very bottom of the stairs is where we had pallets. That was another thing we put all of the books on boxes on pallets to keep them up off of the floor. Just in case, like my husband said, you don't know if something else is going to break and more water is going to come in. I'm like, thank you so much for that. But we were worried and so we thought we better keep the boxes up off the floor. So we did and they were on pallets. Those boys went down there. We basically created a fire line and there was just one after another and the Newman boys started out first. And they just started grabbing those books and bringing them up. And then the Wahoo guys were up. The wine snaked all the way over. We had signage around the library where we wanted certain, where the books would be stacked. Then we had each area kind of had its own space. And we had volunteers kind of there to, okay, what does the box say? And you're reading the boxes and getting everything. It was controlled chaos. One hour later, we had 1,100 boxes of books out of that basement. Wow, and that's awesome. Actually, if you go off of here, back to your main pictures and scroll up on your Facebook, because I just found you said you had a video. Scroll up and let's see. There it is. Go to your library, the library's main Facebook page, yeah. And then click where it says more, right to the writer of views, yeah. And videos. And the video you took is right there. That's where I ended up, that first one there. So you can go ahead and play that if people wanna see it. The second one is you had some entomologists come, but the first one there is. And it was really hard to kind of get that. Well, that's awesome. That's why I took an hour. Look how fast those boys are going. And it was so funny because one of the boys, I was kind of, you know, as you're running around the building and you're looking at everything. And one of the boys actually made the comment in the line. He goes, this is why they invented the Kindle. I'm like, and I didn't know who said it, but I heard him say it and I turned around. I'm like, who said that? Who said that? I'm like, you know, it really was because it was boxed. And then another boy goes, I had no idea this would be so hard, and they were having fun with it too because as they came upstairs then, and I'd never been around that many teenage boys at once in my life, but they got pretty rowdy and they were starting to basically the smaller boys that were upstairs, then they would throw the box of books up in the air and then the other poor kid would have to catch it. Well, after the third time of it, dropping on the floor, I was kind of waiting for the coaches to say something. Well, they didn't, they were just standing around talking and I'm like, okay, I've got to stop this. So I did go over and I'm like, all right, everybody stop. And I'm the short woman over there in the sea of all these tall boys and trying to get them to stop throwing. I'm like, okay, the next person who throws a box of books and it lands on the floor is gonna drop and give me 20. Of course they're looking at me like, yeah, right, ladies, but you don't know. You have no idea, yeah. Don't mess with the library director. No. But it ended up being a great and our friends group then bought pizza. We bought 10 pizzas from each. We have a Casey's that has pizza and a Pizza Hut and so each place and we had drinks and cookies and stuff for the boys and they were just, they had no idea they were gonna get food. They were just excited about more like, oh, you're gonna give us food? So it was a great community effort which we had several times throughout our disaster. I was always amazed at the people who stepped up from out of nowhere to offer their assistance. The lady who saw us on TV and called me out of the blue and said, I have a house full of books. I'm scaling down, moving to an apartment. Do you want my books? And of course you're thinking, okay, great. What kind of books does she have and what are they like? And I actually, a coworker and I went into her home in Omaha and we saw the books and they were like brand new hardbacks from the last two years. She had bought like at Sam's or at Burns and Noble. She was a voracious reader, beautiful copies. A lot of them had only been read once. We ended up, the maintenance guys and I took a trailer to Omaha. We ended up filling that trip. 52 boxes of the boxes like this that we had used to move. We filled in her home with books and we put a lot of them back on the shelf. There were a lot of copies that she had of things that we had lost. Our bookstore is restocked with all beautiful new books. The ones that we didn't need are in the friends. We have a bookstore in the library that the friends, the money all goes to the friends. So that was able to help them out. So it was all just so many good things happened. And I always tell people that it also gave us the opportunity to change things about the building that we didn't like. After if any of you built a new house or you built a library, after you move in, it's like, why the heck did we do this? Why, I wish we could change this. Well, we got the opportunity to make some changes to the building and we were fortunate to have a very generous foundation that had money. They agreed to pick up the extra cost over and above what the insurance didn't cover. So we were able to change some doorways. We changed the children's area that used to have these walls like this, these solid walls, and then it was open at the top. This is now all enclosed glass with doors and then we still have half walls, but it's enclosed it to the fact that it's a little bit more, it's quieter. Plus, we have more visibility. It was hard to see through a solid wall. Yeah. See back there a lot easier. This one here actually had a quilt on it. It was under plexiglass and it was one of the first fundraising things that we did. We, within the first hour or so, we called the Quilt Museum in Lincoln and they said, get it out of there as soon as possible because of the humidity. So we, again, stepped up. They stored the quilt for us. They stored, we have a mural in our meeting room that they stored for us. So they were very helpful in storing some of those items. I wanted to show you one picture that it's kind of weird looking. This one here, this was from the restoration company. This is one of the drying units. This is a drying unit, I believe, and this is a dehumidifier, but they had to actually drill holes in that wall. This was the main wall that sustained a lot of water damage because the water broke on the other side in that meeting room. They had all these tubes running out then to dry our building out and to get all that water sucked out. They were monitoring the building 24-7 for that first week for the humidity levels and they knew then once they got it dry that it would be okay. And we were amazed that after the first couple of, there was never a smell. We never had a bad smell or anything like that. The company said the one good thing about it it was a clear water pipe break. So it wasn't like sewer water. Right, it wasn't dirty or anything. Yeah, right in there. No, no, it was pretty clean water. Obviously, the carpet being so wet, that was the one sticking point too with the insurance company. They at first were not gonna replace our carpet. They were just going to dry it and set off a mold bomb, whatever our mold bomb is, and then it would be fine. And I'm like, no, you can't guarantee me that there's not some damp spot somewhere that could grow mold. And basically it was kind of a negotiation thing. We decided by not sending the books to Texas and spending thousands of dollars to clean books that we lost were mainly just your general fiction. A lot of things were due to be needed anyway, or the things that we really wanted to replace. I found I could go on Amazon and get a user one for $5. So why would I spend $15 per book for the cleaning and the extra shipping to Texas on a bunch of books that, to me, it was wasteful. So we negotiated with the insurance company then if we didn't send the books to Texas, then they would replace the carpet. And I think I got the better deal because we ended up costing $39,000 to go. I don't think the book repair would have been quite that much, but we worked out okay. So I don't know if there's anything else, Crystal, that, I mean, any picture-wise if there's something that you want. This is the meeting room here. Actually, this area right here is where the pipe was at that broke. And you can see where a lot of that ceiling wall, this sustained a lot of damage in here. It ended up, the problem we found was, well, there were several mitigating factors that ended up, the people that installed our fire system did not do a very good job. When we hired the consultants, after we started to negotiate on this with the insurance and found out, they would cover the damage to our building, but they didn't actually cover the fire piping system to repair that. They said, no, that's not covered because it caused the disaster, it wasn't damaged in the disaster. So therefore they didn't cover that. So that 18, which ended up being an over an $18,000 repair bill, that the city has to pay on their own, but we are in litigation now to try to recover that cost back from the two companies that we are suing, the Fire Alarm Company and another company that did work on what's called the Backflow Preventor. So they were both involved in the building. And that's what they have pretty much determined. That was where the damage, but the reason it happened in the first place is that was done incorrectly or? Yes, there was some negligence. When Continental is our new fire company, Continental Fire, their consultants, their technicians, when they came down from the initial inspection, they went up in the ceiling up in here and inspected the entire system and the guy from Continental, he came down and he said, it's the third worst install that he'd ever seen. He actually said it should have broke right over in here. He was surprised within the first couple of years of building operation. He said, I'm surprised you haven't had a major break right over in here. He said, I would have guessed that's where your break was going to be. So that evidently could have broke at any time, but it just, through some miracle or grace, we didn't have it happen there. It happened less in an area that basically just had tables and chairs in it. Still caused a lot of damage, but it really could have been a lot worse maybe over here. We could have had a lot more damage. And it didn't when it would have broke too, because that would have been something totally random. There could have been a bunch of people in the library. Right, and by not having our system monitor too, we were fortunate that we were in the building when it broke, because if it would have happened in the middle of the night, who knows if any of our neighbors around us would have heard the alarm going off. The water could have run for two or three hours. And this kind of alarm, as you said, you had to call and let the fire department know. It wasn't something that then sends an automatic sensor or message to them, let them know. Yeah, now if there's any trouble on that panel, it automatically dials the alarm company, and then it would go to 911, of course. And then I have my number down as a backup in my city administrator and my maintenance man. So if there's a question, they're gonna call me first and say, hey, what's going on in building? And of course, if I'm here, I can say, well, there's a problem. Otherwise, like, no, I don't know what's going on, because they've already called us once where we were having some issues, we're having some phone issues, so. But it's worth, I would say it's worth the money to have at your own peace of mind. You wanna be able to sleep at night and not have to worry about your building. But again, problems, and those are the things that happen in construction that you as a library director don't always know. Oh no, you wouldn't, yeah. You're hiring these people. You're hiring the architect, engineer the people that you assume they know what they're doing and they're installing things correctly. And I certainly do not have the knowledge or the expertise to follow some guy around and say, are you doing that right? Are you doing this right? Now, of course, when any of them come into my building, I immediately ask their name, who are you? Why are you here? What are we doing? And I get a written copy. We had reports before from the other company, but they were just never really complete. I didn't always have a date on them. I didn't always have a name of who was here. Now, everyone maintenance-wise who comes into my building to do anything, I log it on my calendar in my office, which is another good thing that I had done on last August when the fire alarm panel was actually downloaded the information off of that panel. They could tell when the water actually entered the system was on the 18th of August. The water went into that pipe. So it sat in that pipe from August until the 7th of January when it actually froze and burst. But I had logged that day of the other company that were actually suing. They were here to do something that day in the building, some type of inspection. And I had made that note, because my city administrator called me and she said, Denise, what happened on the 18th of August? Who was there? Who did what? And I did have that record, thank goodness, because that was helpful to know, okay, somebody was here that obviously maybe did something wrong. Another thing that was a problem for us is when the building was built, we did not have a maintenance person at that time. It was just the library director, myself, and one other staff person. When the fire alarm company showed up to walk us through the building and explain the system, you know, this guy, he, again, was like, well, where's your maintenance man? Well, we don't have one. Well, and I could tell he was not happy having to explain the things to me. And I don't even know, I wasn't even in charge of the building at the time. I don't know why, I was the one who did the walkthrough. But I did do a walkthrough and I had those notes. Unfortunately, I didn't date them or write down who the person was. But I pretty much, I could kind of narrow it down because of when we'd moved into the building. We knew it had to be like June or July of 2006 that we had done this walkthrough. And there was a lot of things on there that should have been explained to us that were never, we were never told. We didn't know about certain, what they call a drum drain in the system that the system creates condensation every month and you have to drain those system every month. And even the company that took over midway through the first company that put, install the system then we didn't keep them on. We switched to another company. And the new company didn't know, they didn't know to check, they didn't look or anything. There was like one drain they were draining. And that was that they were missing a whole other drain that should have been, you know, being maintained as well. Yeah. So many things that you, that, I mean, this is great, Denise. So many things that you wouldn't even think of that. Like I said, if you have a maintenance guy, if he made maintenance person, they might know what you're supposed to be keeping up with. But also just having to trust these construction companies who come in and do it that they are reliable, know what they're doing, we'll do it correctly and won't do a, you know, not as good a job. Kind of just have to have a lot of faith, I guess. Well, you do. And it's not a lot of problems. Another issue that we had with our building committee with the new library, it was mostly women. And not that women don't understand these things or can know these things. But sometimes you just have some issues there that kind of play against each other. And sometimes things get lost in the meetings. And, you know, you just have to have somebody, I would say if you're gonna have a building committee, have someone on that committee that really understands construction and building issues. You just, you need to find someone out there. Bring in somebody who's not part of the library, maybe just someone like Anthony, that your husband has a construction company. Oh, husband, there's a few men on that committee. Like that, yeah. Who have been great, yeah. Reach out to someone separate from the company you've hired to do the work. Kind of like getting a second opinion. It's just kind of a bad, and somebody who, you know, is not afraid to ask questions. Because a lot of times these guys, you know, if you start questioning them, then they're like, oh, they kind of know what they're talking about, or I'm gonna be careful because they're gonna be watching me. And most of the people are great and really truly wanna do a good job. And they're doing their job the best they can. It's just sometimes these things, I think, slip through, and you just don't, you don't even know what happens until it's too late. And that's sometimes the unpredictability that you can't plan for. But, you know, we had a written disaster plan. I will be on. That's good, yeah. That's what I was gonna ask about, because I know a lot of libraries may or may not, but that is something very important to know. What do we do? Who does what? When do we do it when something happens? And it was. It was fine to have it in writing, but I have to be honest, I never actually pulled the written plan because right there in the moment, it's happening. Oh, yeah. What do you do is, you know, it's dial 911. Then you let all of your city people know, you know, the city, your city administrator, your city manager, whomever, know what's happening because then they will take over a lot of that important stuff, the dealing with an insurance company, the cleanup, that type of thing. So, but we did work, we worked very, very well together. Another issue that kind of grows up that is still causing me trouble is phones. We have Windstream as our phone provider. We were in the process of switching over to Charter at the time, and so that kind of made a double problem because we were having, we were gonna have the phone switched over, but we had only switched over internet to Charter, but not the phone service. And then trying to move to the new building and get the phone service hooked up, and then Windstream said, oh, we can't because Charter has a hold on your number, and then Charter would say, no, I don't have a hold on the number, you can have it. And I ended up having to basically threaten to go to the public service commission to get anything resolved. And it was just that, I spent more time on phone, chasing down phone service for the new, for the temporary location, I think, than I did packing up boxes. And I'm still having problems with phones. And I don't know if there's water somewhere that we don't know. If there were phone lines that were damaged or something. Some of the stuff might not shake out till a year later. Yeah. You just don't know. It's gonna be a lot of leftover repercussions of what happened. Well, and probably about, we were constantly, I would come to the building every day to empty our book drop and get things, and the building was sitting here empty and cold and lonely and nothing was going on. And a lot of our patrons didn't understand why it was taking so long. That's another point that if you're gonna have problems, you've gotta have a good public relations with your community to get the word out that, it's not that we're dragging our feet because we don't wanna reopen. It's there's issues now that have come up and we need to address these before we go back in. Oh yeah, I would hope they would understand these things. We're talking about safety here. Yes. Yes, these were safety like codes that we had to deal with. And the insurance company too wanted to make sure before we open you back up and go in, we wanna make sure that the system is up and running and installed correctly and everything is good. And two, once we had to go to litigation, obviously that started to slow things down because then we got lawyers involved and they had to come in. Everyone has a right to do their investigation into the disaster. So we had, one day I had I think eight men up in the ceiling, up in this area that were, they were climbing the rafters to see and they could take pictures of everything and they have that discovery of evidence. They have that right to do that. So yeah, so that took a while. And then it was until we didn't actually start repairs, then we moved out in January. We didn't start actual repairs in the building until May. So we were totally out of here with nothing going on except back behind the scenes, things that the public wasn't always aware of, all that backstory. And then from May till August, and we moved back in the end of August and opened the 8th of September. So we moved out, disaster happened January 7th and then September 8th, nine months practically to the day we moved back and opened to the public. And not at all near the time they assumed, predicted that you would be back again. No, that ain't, oh yeah. Yeah, so don't always believe that of course, no, sometimes you need a second page. Okay, so nobody had any questions while you were talking. I think everyone like me was just enthralled by, oh my gosh, what happened? It does anybody who's around have any questions, comments or thoughts for Denise, you wanna know anything about more about anything? Type them into the questions section of your go-to webinar interface. I have, to go along with her hoarding afterwards, I'll let you know while you're thinking about that. I have added to our delicious links that will be included linked to the library's Facebook page here and it'll sublink to the album that these photos are in, that video of the boys moving the books and a bunch of different news articles that was shared on the library's page about what happened and when it was going on and then the reopening and everything. So we've got a lot of information and resources that will be included with the recording when that's available. And Chris, to something else too that was very valuable for us was, my city administrator was just the best. She was fabulous, but she did a lot of research on her own into our fire suppression system and found out that any of those pipes that when you have the galvanized pipe like we have that it creates condensation and that there's weak links in the pipe and it can get damaged and you don't even know about it. And one of these white paper studies that she found from an engineer basically said that there are these types of systems all over the country that are basically accidents waiting to happen because the condensation that builds up in the pipes causes corrosion and then that weakens the pipe. And so you just don't know how many are out there. You know that there's just thousands of these systems out there and they could happen anywhere at any time happen anywhere. Yes, we do have one question that came in. Since we've done for our Southeast Community College what, if anything, will you or have you changed about your disaster plan? Did this make any change to that, the plan that you actually have in place? I don't know. I think probably the one plan that we have in place that would probably go through it and update names, phone numbers, make sure that we have that contact information for like the restoration company. Make sure the water shut-offs are clearly marked. Who's in charge of who can come in the building and who can't, those types of things. Just kind of, some of it you think of it's just general common sense, but sometimes it's best you have it, if it's not wrote down, it doesn't exist. Yeah, and when you're in the middle of this stressful situation, that's what the plan can really help you with is figuring out what do we need to do right now. Yeah. Yes, and it was very, and that was another huge, huge amount of stress, very stressful. Okay, it doesn't look any other questions came in. So I think that we will officially wrap it up for today. If nobody has any urgent questions, you can, I'm sure it can contact Denise there at the library anytime you want to, if you have more questions you wanna ask her or she'll talk about what they did. They did have their grand reopening just this past weekend, correct? Yes. Yes. So they're official. Rededication, I believe you said you were doing it as. So they are back in business, and I hope things go, stay safe, stay uneventful as possible at the library. I don't think we got our photos on from our reopening yet. I don't think we, because Carrie got sick and I don't think we got them in yet. So, yeah, it was more just the pieces, so, yeah. They'll be up there eventually. We'll get them up there, yeah. Stop by, see the library, see how it looks now. Thank you very much, Denise. I'm really glad that we got you on the show. I had to quit a couple of people here at the commission recommend reaching out to you for this since it had happened, and I decided I think it might be good. I didn't wait until things were actually done and not jump on you right away. So I waited until, we've been monitoring what's been going on there and making sure. Thank you very much. So, we're on your support down there. Glad to have you here. So, I'm gonna take back control here to my screen. All right, there we go. So, thank you very much everyone for attending. Thank you very much, Denise, for presenting on this course. I hope it was, I think it was helpful. I learned a lot about what to do and just very interesting, yeah, everything you had to go through. So, that will wrap it up for today's show. It has been recorded and will be available some day later today. I hope you join us next week when it's our monthly tech talk with Michael Sowers, who is the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And he's got John Mansi, who's a consulting person who talk about using Arduino, which is an open source electronics type of products that you can use to teach programming in libraries. So, we're gonna talk all about that on next week's show. So, hopefully you join us for that and any of our future shows coming up. Thank you very much and that wraps it up for today. Bye-bye. Bye.