 Water is by far the most common cause of damage to museum, library, and archive collections. But all water is not the same. Think of the difference, for instance, between the contents of a burst sewage pipe, what drips down from a leaky roof, and sea water from coastal flooding. Knowing what kind of water you're dealing with is essential, certainly to planning what salvage actions you'll take, but most importantly to your safety. You're going to want to know, is that water that's clean water, or is that water that's potentially contaminated? It may contain things that you don't want to come into contact with. So you're going to want to know the nature of the water before handling anything that's been in water. Emergency authorities on site will know of any health or safety hazards in the water. And they'll likely be the ones to give you the okay to enter the area. In the meantime, make sure you're wearing protective clothing. Like a long sleeve shirt, long pants, a hard hat, waterproof gloves, sturdy rubber boots, and safety glasses to protect your eyes from splashes. Also, make sure you've got a cell phone or walkie-talkie and a partner to work with. For other gear, bring a still or video camera if possible, as well as pens, pencils, and paper for note-taking and documenting. Finally, along with a supply of absorbent materials, you may need some special tools or equipment. Things that are useful are things like wet vaks that can suck up water, sump pumps, dehumidifiers, fans, and some basic equipment like that that will help you eliminate as much water as possible. If you have a really huge problem, you may need to get help from a contractor who does emergency response with water emergencies. Remember, be careful when handling or transporting objects that have been in water for any length of time. They're sure to be fragile and heavier than usual. You really have to make sure that you are stabilizing the objects as you're transporting them, meaning having carts and things to transport them. Never carry a wet box just on its own because you never know when the box is going to give way. You'll want to dry or freeze objects as soon as possible to prevent mold, so sort them by degree of wetness. If you have small quantities of items that are damp but not soaked, air drying is an effective method. For this, you'll need time and good air circulation. And then you need surface space because you need to lay everything out and spread it out. You need to fan open books. You need to separate, say, a mat from a print so that the air can actually get to the object so that it can dry it out. You're going to need blotters, table coverings, and lots of manpower probably to do air drying. You're going to have fans going but you don't want the fans directed specifically at the objects. You want to increase the level of air circulation so that material will most effectively dry. When you're air drying, objects need to be turned and flipped frequently to speed drying and minimize warping. Photographs can be dried in several ways. You can either dry them by clipping them to a clothesline or you can dry them flat on absorbent material. If you do dry them flat, you just have to be careful of puddling on the top of the photographs. You can take an absorbent material and just very, very gently try to wick up some of that moisture. Make sure the photographs are dried with the image side up. Be prepared, though. It might take as much as two weeks to get things thoroughly dry. One way to help speed up drying is a technique called interleaving. Interleaving is just a piece of absorbent material. It can be newsprint, it can be paper toweling, it can be blotters. And simply what you're doing is cutting a piece of paper a little bit larger than the size of the text block of the book and just inserting it between pages to help assist drawing out some of that moisture more quickly from the pages. You maybe want to interleave maybe every 25-50 pages. Drying can also be done outdoors. However, keep most objects away from direct sunlight. Some items, like coated paper, should not be air-dried at all. In situations where you don't have the personnel or the space to air-dry or you have too many wet objects in very little time, freezing may be your best option. What you can do is put many of your collections into a freezer, a chest freezer or it might even be a large freezer truck that has been moved onto site. It buys you time. It prevents mold from growing. And then when you have the luxury of time, materials, and volunteers, staff and you've established a treatment process, you can take them out of the freezer either one at a time, a box at a time, and then spread them out and dry them in a more controlled atmosphere. Keep in mind that some objects like paintings, furniture and electronic media should never be frozen. If you have any questions, contact a conservator or refer to the emergency response and salvage wheel. Now, to freeze objects, pack them in sturdy containers made of waterproof material. Keep wet objects separate from damp ones and use freezer or wax paper to prevent objects from touching each other. Then pack objects in a single layer. For books, you would wrap them with a piece of butcher paper and then put them into milk crate or crates. They usually go in spined down into the crate. During the salvage effort, you may hear terms like vacuum freeze drying and thermal or vacuum drying. These are all drying techniques that must be done by professionals. A detailed explanation can be found in your field guide or salvage wheel. Sometimes, the best option is keeping items wet by storing them in clean water. This is useful for coated papers like magazines. If it's not possible to freeze them right away, you can keep them in cool, clean water up to 24 hours. Salty, dirty or contaminated water presents specific salvage problems. If allowed to dry on materials like metal, leather, ceramic or paper, it can be very destructive. In these cases, rinsing objects exposed to salty or contaminated water may be the best option. You would decide to rinse an object if you were sure that the object was stable enough to handle being rinsed. Some objects are more fragile than others. If there are metal objects or maybe wooden objects, if you have bins that you can set up to actually immerse the objects and progressively clean your water like three or four bins and keep changing the water out. Your last bath, you know, make sure the watering in the bin is relatively clean. If you're considering rinsing off a paper object or maybe a photograph and it's a single layer, just like one photograph, not a stack of photographs stuck together or in an album, you'll want to make sure you give that some support. You can put it on a piece of plexiglass and put it at an angle. And then use a hose and spray the front of that object and then turn it over into the reverse side. If you have books, don't open the book up when you go to rinse it. Make sure you hold that book closed really tightly and you just want to rinse off the cover and just give that a good rinse. You don't want to deal with trying to open that book up and rinsing individual pages because once again they're paper, they're very vulnerable. Guidelines for rinsing wet ceramics and glass objects are pretty clear cut. If you're looking at a bunch of objects and you're considering which ones do I want to rinse first, you'll want to go through your ceramics starting with the lowest-fired ceramics to the higher-fired ceramics like porcelain and then do your glass. If they've been immersed in contaminated or salt water, take care of them right away. But if they've been in relatively clean water, you can deal with them after salvaging objects with higher priority. Before placing ceramic items in a plastic bag, make sure they're completely dry to stop any potential mold growth. Corrosion is another of several problems water can create. Metal objects immersed in salt or contaminated water should be rinsed in clean water as soon as possible and then air dry. This helps prevent the corrosion from setting in. For more information, refer to the sections on mold and corrosion on this DVD. You might also want to check out the other segments on mud and bleeding and dye transfer. The bottom line is, when in doubt about how to salvage wet objects, consult a conservator, the field guide to emergency response, or the emergency response and salvage wheel.