 Susan, welcome, everyone. Thank you for attending today. I'm Jenny Wiley-Arena with Heritage Preservation. I am assuming we may have some new participants today to the community. So let me start by giving a quick introduction, and then we'll move on to our topics. The Heritage Preservation moderates the Connecting to Collections online community in partnership with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The site is designed and produced by Learning Time. The goal of the online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. About twice a month, the online community features a particularly helpful preservation resource and hosts a webinar related to it. These resources, including a recording of today's webinar, can be found under the Topics menu at ConnectingToCollection.org. And you'll also see it on the front of our page for a bit. So today, I am so pleased to welcome both Beverly Perkins and Hilary Kaplan. They both agreed quite last minute to provide advice on collections recovery today in response to Hurricane Sandy. Thank you both so much for joining us. And if you wouldn't mind telling us a little bit about your background, Beverly, I'll start with you. Well, can you tell that I live in Wyoming? And can you tell that by looking at my picture that I'm not really from Wyoming? No Wyoming, I would show a picture like that. I'm the Objects Conservator at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. I've worked at the Brooklyn Museum and at Winter Chores. So I've also worked on the East Coast. And Hilary and I traveled to New Orleans after Katrina and talked to people there about recovery. I've been involved with recovery from Katrina and also went to Haiti after the earthquake. Thank you so much. Hilary, how about you? Excuse me. I've been involved in disaster preparedness response and recovery for a very long time. I think if I go all the way back, it's about 25 years. I spent most of my career as a conservator at the Georgia Archives, where we provided assistance to those who had experienced disasters. Probably the most notable piece there is you could probably tell from my accent that I'm not originally from Georgia. And when we had floods in 94, there were lots of jokes about my interviews being closed captioned so that people in South Georgia would be able to understand my accent. So I've been all over the place. And more recently, I've been a senior conservator at the National Archives, where I oversaw the salvage of records in Orleans parish for mission. And recently, I've been a training specialist in records management for government agencies at the National Archives. I spend almost every summer with my colleague Sharon Bennett teaching emergency preparedness response and recovery at the Campbell Center. Should you want more activity? So that's my little quote. OK. Thank you. Thank you both so much for joining us today. So before we get right into the presentation, we just have a few poll questions. And this will really give us a better idea of where you all are coming from and what you might need from this webinar. So our first question is, who are you representing today? Yourself, public library, an academic library, a special library collection, historical society, historic home or site, museum, archives, municipal repository, or other. So I'll give you a chance to fill that out. And I will go ahead and set up our next question. And it looks like we have people from all over the place. So we'll see if there are any immediate hurricane Sandy needs. But our next question is, why are you joining us today? So is your institution sustained damages to collections because of Hurricane Sandy? Has your institution sustained damage to buildings? You have a personal collection or property damage. You're interested in helping an institution that sustained damage. You're interested in helping the public. And then, of course, it looks like our most popular answer, Hurricane Sandy has encouraged you to seek out disaster preparedness training. And that seems to be our most popular today, although we do have a few who, around three, four people who have had a building or collections damaged. All right, so this may not apply to very many people, but I will pull it over anyway. If you have collections or property, it has been damaged, whether it's personal or institutional collections, what is their status? Have you retrieved them or are you unable to do so? All right, and our last question is just an open-ended response. And what are you guys working for? What are you trying to get out of the webinar today? And feel free to type in your response and hit Enter. And this will really give us an idea of the types of topics to cover today. And we'll just give that a few minutes. So it sounds like today a lot of it is preparedness. We do have people interested in water damage. And we do have Sandy Stark, who looks like you are in New Jersey, and you're interested in getting help on personal items and how to help the public. I'll give this just a few more minutes. It looks like people are still typing. It looks like people are still typing. I'm going to pull this over, but feel free. In the Q&A section to continue answering this question, it will continue to help us throughout the presentation to just kind of guide the content. So let me pull this over. And I will pull over the presentation for today. Now, during the presentation, please feel free to keep your questions coming in that Q&A box. If we aren't able to get to them right away, we will definitely try to do so before our hour is up. So Hilary and Beverly, I will pass things over to you. And Bev, I understand that you're going to have control of the slides. Is that correct? I have control, Hilary. Are you ready? Yeah, I am. So the folks at Heritage Preservation were thoughtful and generous enough to be providing us with some slides to give some visuals to our presentation today. And this is what Coney Island looks like now, as opposed to the previous slide, which is what Coney Island looks like in our memories in terms of beautiful days in the summer and going on rides and going to the beach. So not that I need to jar your memory, but things haven't gone so well. So in responding to this disaster, one of the things that we need to think about is setting priorities. Think about the stages of collection response in terms of going in and doing what I like to refer to as a reconnaissance mission, an initial assessment to determine what's been going on. During this phase, you're not going to move anything. You're going to be documenting, documenting, documenting, taking pictures of things. Based on the information that you gather, you want to think about how you're going to approach responding, so creating a response plan. And then contemplate how you're going to actually, if you're handling all this on your own in terms of salvage, or if you're looking to bring in a commercial vendor who can assist you in the salvage and recovery stage of materials. And then we're going to talk as need be in terms of the restoration and the rehabilitation of a building. But I get the impression that probably most of you are most interested in thinking about the materials or collections rather than the facilities. And if there is some disagreement on there, please let us know in the chat box. And also, I think it's interesting, if you're tuning in to us because you're interested in planning for a disaster. You haven't suffered a disaster right now. When you hear what we're talking about now, I think the best way to plan to respond to a disaster is to do some of this ahead of time. If you think, oh, yes, I would have to do an initial assessment after the disaster, imagine how helpful it would be to do the really initial assessment now before the disaster. And even as far as a response plan, looking around to alternative places to put things. So think of these response steps and how to do it ahead of time. Just in case you haven't. OK, going on. Thanks for pointing that out. In fact, as I mentioned, that often when I teach disaster response, I teach the response first and then go back to the preparedness part because I think people have a real appreciation for how useful and important the preparedness part can be and how much angst it can save on the other side. So you've already sort of experienced the disaster and now you recognize how important it is to go back. And when the situation defaults you in some time in the future, you know exactly what to do or pretty much what to do. OK, I want to talk a little bit about mental health and disaster situations and how this really needs to not be underestimated. Yes, disasters have a far-ranging impact and not everyone needs to be involved in responding to a disaster. For example, some people respond by giving money. Some people respond by giving advice over the phone so that you can be a part of what is involved in the response without actually appearing on site and handling materials, et cetera, et cetera. Because we all need to recognize what our capacities are and where we may be limited in some ways. So you want to definitely recognize what you can and cannot do. Disaster response is exhausting. It's very tiring both physically and emotionally, especially if you don't have the ideal setup that you're bending down. And so after a while, just physically, your body is going to tire. But when you're responding in sort of this stressful situation, you're not at 100%. And so recognize that things that may not bother you otherwise just really set you off. And also recognize that other people responding have lots of things going on in their lives. And whereas what you say might not seem to be a trigger to set off a response that's not positive, you don't know what's going on with other people. You don't know how much stress they're going through in their personal life or in their personal setting. So it's sort of a gentle activity. You want to keep that in mind. You want to keep in mind that what you say may not be as important as how you say it. Also that people under stress don't take in a whole lot of information. So you want to limit your recommendations to people to maybe three at most. And so you want your explanations to be brief and limited so that people have a time to assimilate the information. Don't assume that because you've told someone how to do something, that they're going to do it the way you think they're going to do it. So there always needs to be follow-up to make sure that people are following instructions the appropriate way. You don't want people tearing up papers to two hours to use as absorbent materials and find that they weren't tearing them the way that you wanted them to be. And so lastly, you don't want to be hurrying. And this is counterintuitive in some ways because you're thinking, oh, there's an emergency and we need to hurry up and do this. No, actually when it doesn't involve human life, you want to slow down your pace so that your actions are thought out and they are deliberate. And you don't want to especially injure yourself because you then don't become part of the solution but part of the problem. And you also want to think about handling materials gently so that you're not inadvertently creating damage in the context of the response versus the disaster itself. Next slide. OK. So as we said, no one who works with a disaster or is involved is not affected. You may have reactions that are not normally how you behave. Depression, PTSD, I had a response there. I didn't say the words correctly. Anxiety and emotions stifled. The devastation when you think about the loss is absolutely overwhelming. And so it may be something, a treasured object. It may be significant financial loss, physical, tangible, intangible. So there are all sorts of elements that come into play. And we're just trying to give you a feel for all the things that are going on with the people who have been involved in this type of situation. It's difficult to make decisions. And that's where the disaster plan is so important. Because if you map things out in your plan in advance, you are not as overwhelmed with facing making important decisions. Decisions in terms of how you're going to go about things, how you can make financially appropriate decisions so that you're thinking about a purchase at a cost effective. So there's a lot of stuff that can get mapped out in advance that you are not pushed to the moment to make a decision in haste. And now I think I'm going to play the role of someone who is thinking about planning for disaster. So when I'm looking at this slide and the last slide, I'm thinking that if you run a drill, that's one of the most valuable things that you can do. You go to your junk store and get things that are really bad paintings, and prints, and even clothing, and vases, and anything else. And you throw them together in a corner of the building in wet conditions, or even put them in the sink. And then you build a team of people and say, come on, we're going to respond to this as this was our where book shelf. And I've run those drills where people go, are we really learning anything? And what's really interesting is if you're doing this with people that you might in the future be responding with, you're really building a team more than anything else. And then afterwards, you say, OK, what would have made this easier? What do we need, just plastic sheeting and towels? That's what I have in my museum. That helps people know where to grab that and run. But more than that, we kind of have figured out our role. And we've thought about alternative places. So that just kind of helps the stress level go down. When you've already run through this together and looked at each other and laughed about it, that helps. Building a team. Thanks, Devin. I'm glad that you mentioned the laughter part of it. Because as you know, I love to laugh. I live to laugh. And it's a really great stress reducer so that people just don't take everything so seriously. They can lay back and have a chance to kind of let go. So laughter is very, very important. OK, so we have some priorities involved in the initial response. Human safety is always a priority. It is the number one priority. So in terms of planning, those of you who are thinking about disaster plans, you want to think first about people so that you want to have a plan for evacuation of the facility. Moving on, you want to think about how you would, in your facility, get staff and visitors out of the building. And you never, ever want to risk lives to save a collection. You want to make sure that everybody is accounted for. The thought of going back to rescue things does not come into play when human safety is concerned. So one of the really important elements is to think about the building stabilization. So before you can be addressing the holding, you need to know whether or not the building is safe to go into. You need to have received word from generally authorities that the building is OK. It may be police fire. It may be your building facilities people. It may be your own home, so it's common sense. So you need to make sure that if you're in doubt, you want to check with people who have more information in terms of what kind of conditions are there. We're going to talk a little bit about what to do when you're first entering your site. So critical operations speak to the vital records that you need in order to get back up and running. These may be personnel records, payroll records, other financial records. When we talk about vital records, these will address how you can get back in business. They will address your emergency response operations and look to see how you can get up and running. Some of the greatest losses that took place after 9-11 were in terms of businesses that did not have a vital records plan and they did not have accessibility to their vital records. Vital records are always copies of records so that they are stored in multiple locations and that you would be able to get access to that information. Collection records and these are listings in paper or electronic form of what your institution holds. Unless you know what you have, you're not going to be able to claim what is lost. Moreover, as part of your preparedness activities, you really need to document what you have because if it comes to a disaster and you say to an insurance company or an agency that is going to be helping you out with recovering from your disaster, well, we used to have a fence around this building and they'll say, well, I don't see a fence there. Well, no, no, no, they took it away. It fell over and they say, but I don't see any evidence of having a fence there so I can't give you any money to put the fence back. So documentation is really the heart of a good emergency plan and good emergency response. So finally, OK, I'll just finish. Finally, you would think about the salvage of your collection and those are going to be based on the priorities that you have already established. OK, I'm done. Well, OK, which brings up, it's some work ahead of time that will save you a lot of work when a disaster does strike. And Gregor and Boston beat me to the point that I was going to make about this slide, that you want to make sure that you check in with your town, regional, and also state first responders to make sure that they know that you're there and know what is in your building. So they're aware that there's a collection that they need to have in their mind. And you want to check in with them also to know what they have in mind during a disaster. How are they thinking of using your building? And then also knowing who's going to let you back in your building, who in your community or in your institution is going to tell you, yeah, it's safe to go back in there now. OK. So before you're going back into the building, you want to think of some of the elements that are involved. So after serious disasters, the staff are anxious to assess collection damage and start response and recovery measures. But your first consideration did not be the safety of the collection. As we mentioned, it's your own personal safety. So when the emergency service personnel or buildings inspectors say that the building is safe to re-enter, they mean that it's safe for the inspectors, the engineers, the abatement professionals, and construction workers who will repair and clean up the building. Regular employees generally cannot enter until these experts say that it is safe to do so. So you don't want to do things like connect electrical generators to the electrical system of the building. This could be a shock hazard to those in the building or those working on power lines. You want to use generators to power only those devices connected to extension cords. You want to make sure that all extension cords are grounded and have overload protection. Make sure they have the capacity to handle the equipment they're being used for. Make sure that the capacity to handle the equipment is approved for use in wet areas. You want to know that adequate escape routes or damaged fire escapes must be corrected before recovery can begin. You want to make sure that you have fire personnel, hold a formal meeting to explain the exiting system and the emergency procedures. There must be at least two escape routes from all areas. And you want to definitely think about when you're setting up some type of response operation. You want to make sure that your portable fire extinguishers are the right type in place for any type of fire. And if the fire protection system has been damaged, whether it's the alarm system or sprinkler system, that you identify those issues. You want to think about gas lines and oil tanks that may be leaking. And until proven otherwise, assume that there might be some problem with it. You want to cut up all service supply until after cleanup is complete. SID and equipment has been chosen. So that's a lot of building-related issues that you may not be the people involved with, but you want to make sure that someone from your facility is familiar with what these issues are. OK. That's Hillary. That's a picture of Hillary, by the way. That is not a picture of me. OK. Pictures of me do appear some places, but this is not one of them. It could be anyone. So you want to make sure that you are up to date on your tetanus shots, particularly if you're working with materials. You don't always know what their history is. So my background is library and archives. And so in dealing with library and archives materials, we always encourage everyone to have tetanus shots. You want to make sure you have gloves for the appropriate activity, whether you're moving things or whether you're handling things. And you want to, nitro gloves eliminate the possibility of people having latex allergies. They come in sexy neon colors, so that's something you might think about. You may need eye protection, goggles or safety glasses if you are in an area that is not particularly clean. You want to make sure that you're not getting things in your eyes. A face shield is not recognized as an appropriate eye protective device. You want the goggles or safety glasses. You want to be wearing protective clothing, such as the Tyvek outfit you see here or aprons. If you're dealing with a lot of debris, you want to make sure that you cover over with duct tape, things like zippers or cuffs to make sure that the particulates don't enter into your clothing. You want appropriate footwear. If you're handling heavy boxes, you want to think about things like having steel code boots. If you're not handling heavy volumes, I don't know that that is that critical. You probably want to have good wedges on your footwear, especially if you're in an area where there's been water to minimize slippage. If you're going into an area and you're not really safe, whether you're not sure whether it is safe, whether it's slippery or not, take something like a walking stick so that you can be balancing yourself. And then my favorite topic, math. This is a very complicated situation. Ideally, if you are in a situation where there are hazards, such as mold or organic solvents, you want to wear a respirator that is going to help protect your lungs against breathing those substances in. Now, particularly with mold, generally, there's an odor. And it's an unpleasant odor. And I know that sometimes people have in the past taken to wearing vixen vapor rub inside a mask so that they're breathing that smell rather than the mold smell. The mold smell is from probably the mycotoxins associated with the mold. Go back to them. Well, that's dirt. That's debris. Yeah, you can go on to that. No, no. I'm sticking with this. OK. You can see that in this slide, you have a half-mass face piece, and you have two magenta cartridges. Now, what those two magenta cartridges say to me is those are cartridges for mold because the cartridges are designed to target specific materials that may be inhaled. Now, if you would have put on those cartridges, you would still smell the mold. That's not taking away the smell of the mold. But you can add on cartridges that would take away the smell of the mold. This is kind of complicated. But if that's something you're used to doing and you're doing all the time, you're going to have an understanding of all of that because in order to wear a respirator, you need to have been trained to do so. You can go to Home Depot and just pick up something off the shelf, but that doesn't mean it's going to be protecting you. In order to wear a respirator because there is a hazard, you have to be fit-tested. And even before you're fit-tested, you have to be approved by a medical professional that says, yes, you have the capacity to wear that type of device and still function normally. So often people will think, well, I'm going to wear a respirator. I'm going to be protected. But that respirator needs to be the right respirator. And you need to have learned how to use that device. Now, there is an OSHA appendix to a standard which talks about using some type of respiratory device when it's voluntary. And what the standard is the required OSHA standard, 1910-134 appendix D. And I encourage you to look at that. And this is saying information for employees using respirators when not required under the standard. So if you were required to wear a respirator, you need to know how to do that. People who have facial hair cannot wear a half-mass respirator because you don't get a good feel. Now, you may see the items on the left which are white items. And they kind of look like dust masks. They're not dust masks. They're what's known as disposable respirators. And I can tell that they fall into that class because they have two straps. These respirators also need to be fit tested to be effective. Your plain dust mask, which has one strap, is not really going to protect you against mold or anything else other than maybe if you were mowing your lawn and you didn't want pieces of grass coming up into your face. That would help. But whenever you stick something over your face, over your nose, and now from which you breathe, you're interfering with the free flow of the air. And so you want to keep that in mind when contemplating using this type of device. So this is all just cautionary information to know that, yes, there are appropriate instances where these devices should be used. But if you don't really know how to use them, you don't want to place yourself in the category of ignorance is bliss. And if I don't know what could have hurt me, it won't. So you want to get all the facts and find out if, in fact, there are hazards that you need to have addressed. So if you think that you're going to, OK, I'm going to deal with the mold if we have a disaster, then you want to be proactive and find out how to get a respirator where you live. It might be dealing with the people in your institution who already wear respirators, and they can tell you how to do that, or it might be a county safety officer. So you might want to do that ahead of time, or you might make the decision that I will not be the person dealing with the mold, and then you don't have to prepare. The worst thing to do, it sounds like, is that the last minute say, oh, I'm going to have to deal with this mold, just borrow my brother's respirator, because that won't work. You can't borrow a respirator. So if you want to prepare ahead of time. Thanks, Deb. Yes, the analogy that I've heard is, think of the respirator as a toothbrush. Ew. Yeah. Well, see, there's a good, a nice mud slide there. So let's prove it otherwise. You want to consider that all mud and debris in water pools might be hiding some type of hazard. Electricity can travel for great distances through water, fence material, or other conductors, and some wires may be hidden in the mud. So you want to first verify that all power is out in the area before walking through mud or water or before clearing debris. So you kind of want to shuffle through mud and water pools when entering for the first time. This idea, when I mentioned a pole or stick, you can lift some of the debris and check for wild animals before moving things away. So you want to go with basic instincts and some of the things you want to be aware of in terms of tripping, cuts, lifting, moving wild animals. And I talked a little bit about mold, and I can go on more about that later in response to questions. But basically, you want to treat all mold as having some type of hazard as it is for some. It may not be in the best interest to need to identify what species of mold you're dealing with. The idea is that you want to take precautions so that it is not going to be affecting those people who are especially sensitive to it. I know I can walk into a room and I can feel my chest constrict. And I know that that is a mold situation. Some people say, oh, it doesn't bother me. Not necessarily. It takes more than one exposure for mold to be able to have an effect on someone. So you want to be very cautious about sending in students or volunteers or other people who may be dealing with moldy material. Libraries and archives material is of particular concern for mold or any other kind of contaminant because these materials get handled. And one of the pieces of information I wanted to bring out is you want to think about in those instances, whether it's the information that you're concerned about or is it the intrinsic value of the artifact. Very often when it's about the information, you want to look into whether that information is available elsewhere, particularly with published sources. Generally, that's the case. And so it may warrant discarding. Often, you can make copies of information. So for example, you know that some of the materials you've been working with have been contaminated in some way. And you're thinking, well, maybe I don't want to let people handle these materials. Maybe those items should be copied. The originals may change, but then provide access to the copies so you don't need to be concerned about someone touching the copy and then maybe touching their face or touching their lips or whatever people may do that we couldn't predict. OK, next one. OK, hold on. I'd actually like to add museum collections to this slide because even though if I respond to a disaster here at my museum, I know that there are weapons. I also know that there are some natural history and Plains Indian objects that have arsenic in them or on them. And so if you're going to help someone else respond to their collection, make sure that you just take the time to ask them, now what kind of objects do you have in here just to protect yourself? So think about what you already know. You want to make sure that the immediate cause of the emergency is under control. So in other words, if there is a leaky pipe, has the water been shut off? Or if there's water pouring in from someplace, has that been addressed? You want to find out what the root cause of the problem is. And is the site now a safe place? Is it still standing water? Is it contaminated? How safe and stable is the environment? So what you want to be doing is you want to be getting this initial assessment. You want to be cautious, and we've been hammering that home since the beginning of this webinar. You want to work in pairs. You never want to be doing anything alone. And Gregor mentioned being in contact with some of your incident command folks. They will require that you do everything in pairs. You cannot show up as a single person in that type of environment. So working in pairs is a great idea, because if something happens, there's someone there to do something about it. So you want to also limit the number of people conducting the reconnaissance. And in an institutional setting, I've kind of narrowed it down to four functions. And I think about there being a facilities person who immediately can size up what needs to be done about stabilizing the environment, what needs to be done about getting up the water so that other people coming in will not have that safety element present so that there will not be the risk of someone falling or slipping. You want to have someone who knows about the big picture, so maybe someone who's coordinating this response, who knows about the collection, who knows what is going to be needed in terms of creating a response plan. And you need to have someone who is documenting everything, someone who is writing notes, speaking into a voice recorder, taking pictures, taking video, whatever it needs to be done. But you want to capture as much information as you can. And you may need to have more than one person fulfilling a documentation function, because you may have a large space and you may need to double up on some of these responsibilities. And the documentation, when you get down to the point of being more specific about the holdings, can become very time consuming. And I think Bev is going to talk to you a little bit more about how you can do that. One of the big points, and it's number four on this slide, is do not move anything when you come in to do an assessment. Anything you move needs to be documented. But the idea is that you've got to go in there and you're just going to get a sense of what's going on. This is not the time to move anything. If water is dripping, you probably want to cover things over, but you don't want to move them until they have been documented. Well, and I think this slide is another good group of reasons to run a drill. I've run drills where everybody's a controlling person, but nobody is willing to step on toes. And so a long time into the drill, I have to finally say, you guys, the stuff is still sitting in the water. Because no one wants to offend anybody and actually step in and take control. But you really do need someone, even if you know all of this information, unless you're in control or the person in control is listening to you, it doesn't matter that you are totally organized to know where you're going with the plan, unless you've been designated as the leader of the recovery effort. Also, I know none of us work with difficult people, but let's just say there was a difficult person that's very territorial that you work with. If you have them on your team ahead of time and they have tasks to do and they know what role they play in the recovery, that really helps ahead of time too. OK, did Hilary say do not move anything? OK, I'm kidding. Yes. Here we go. OK, one of the points that I wanted to make was something you just said and it had to do with your plan. And that is you set up a team and you're thinking, OK, so-and-so does this task and so-and-so does that task. And then you know what? They've had a disaster at home, just like you've had at your repository. And they're not showing up. And someone else needs to take on that task. And that's why I'm a big component of thinking in terms of what functions need to be carried out, not necessarily the person to carry out. You want to think about the function. And if there isn't the person there to carry out that function, someone else is going to need to step up to the plate. So it's nice as you're doing training to think about training in different types of functions so that there are backup, that people are just not schooled in one activity, but they have experience in other activities because they may will be called upon to participate in those activities. In terms of planning, you also want to capitalize on the strengths of people you have on staff so that if someone works with finances, it probably makes sense to bring them into dealing with finances in both the planning and the response portion of an emergency. OK, so stabilizing the environment. And this is something that we want to get done quickly. We want to lower the relative humidity. So you want to see if you can't get that below 60%. No mold? Good. And so if you don't have mold, you want to get good air circulation going. So that will help dry things out. And often, what is giving mold an environment in which to thrive is that there is stagnant air. And so if there is no mold, get the air moving. On the other hand, if there is mold, you don't want to be pushing it all over the place. So you really need to be clear on making that distinction. No mold, get the air circulating. Mold, you have to think again on how you're going to address the mold. OK, so think of what sort of resources you have on hand for stabilization, what sort of things you're going to need. Can you stabilize the environment yourself? Does this mean something as simple as opening the window? OK, we saw in Katrina where there were areas where the doors were held shut. The mold growth was terrible. And yet in areas where they had an iron gate, because it was property confiscated in the context of a criminal court, they had an iron gate. And what they did is they opened the door before the iron gate. And there was so much less mold growing because there was some air circulation at the time. So open the windows. Let the air come in. And that will be helpful in drying out your space and just eliminating a lot of the stagnation that's gone on there. Often you're going to need to, if you can afford it, to bring in vendors that will be reducing the level of moisture in the space and drying the site out. Here in this image, I believe that we are looking at a fan. One of the really good tools is a dehumidifier. Or two, I actually am here in my basement and I have two of those. You can't have too many dehumidifiers, I always say. OK, next slide. And so here is what we were describing, where it's the introduction of dry air to a space in order to drive the moisture out and reduce the relative humidity. OK, documentation, documentation, documentation. You want to be able to provide information to people up the managerial line, officials, and the public, depending on what type of repository you're working in. You want to begin to think about how you're going to provide access. Do you have copies of materials that maybe can be provided? Are there holdings that are available through other institutions? And then the idea of how you need to go about stating insurance claims, the more documentation you have, the better off you are. So if you're planning, make sure that you talk to your insurance company and tell them you're preparing for emergency response. What would they like to see from you? What kind of documentation would they like to see from you? And what liability do you have in responding to that disaster? There's also the possibility that if you are having people do extra work, you're having volunteers come in, if you are documenting the hours put in to respond to the disaster, there are instances where you can be reimbursed. So it's important to get people to be signing in and signing out, so you don't want to underestimate certain aspects of documentation in any place. I noticed Gregor made a comment about mold also like dark areas. I'm sorry, Gregor, but that's a myth. Mold can grow in light areas, dark areas, depending on what type of the mold it is. The issue is really the stagnant air. And generally, when you have a closed door and the lights are turned out, you're going to find the mold growing because there's no air circulation. The lightness or darkness is really irrelevant. OK, Deb, you were going to talk about the field guide assessment form? OK, well, Alicia asks a great question about having this emailed to her. And I'm assuming the answer is yes. And you could also access this PowerPoint after we're finished through Heritage Preservation and Connecting to Collections website. But I'm sure you'll get that answer soon, written in the Q&A. So this is a field guide assessment form. It looks pretty complicated, so this is another reason to work ahead and make your own form. But never make your own form from scratch. Always feel it. So you can use this and say, oh, I'm not going to need to know that, or oh, I need to add this. It's really good because it's got things already listed for you, so you don't have to make a list. They're already listed. And then you can just use the notations that you want to put in there. And then do we show you how? Sorry. Go ahead. I was going to ask you if you had anything else to say. OK, I was going to say that you want to prioritize things. You don't want to say a whole bunch of things are urgent because that doesn't tell you where to start. So you want to use numbers, like 1, highest priority, 2, 3. Make sure you always have a legend telling you what a number is going to mean, whether one means it's the highest or one is the lowest. Sometimes you might want to color code things, so that yellow is that can wait, or red is it must be addressed immediately. So you want to think about how you're going to be able to interpret your assessment forms and your documentation well after the fact. Scott mentioned that UV is used to, or I think UV will help keep mold growth down. The thing about ultraviolet radiation is it breaks chemical bonds. And so if it is doing destruction to the mold, it's doing it by addressing what's going on in the cell. UV from sunlight is minimal by putting things out in the sun. The effect is really primarily drying it out. So yes, UV can be used, but it's not about the light. It's about the light. Let me just jump in for a second. I really want to get to Alicia's question. She's in New Jersey, and we talked about not moving an item, making sure we document it. And one of her questions was, she was told to move items away from a wet wall. Obviously, there's that overwhelming desire to protect our stuff, but then also weighing the need to document. Are there templates to show you how to move items and how to document them? And then I have a follow-up question as well. Wow, I didn't see the question, because I'm looking on the wrong side. OK, more about how to set up and run a drill. Can I answer? Yeah, so I really go ahead. Yeah, I think even though we say document everything and make sure you slow down, if there are objects that are in danger, figure out where to move them. But definitely move them out of danger. And basic art handling is don't move the object like you would at home. At home, we would grab the arms of the chair and just move it. Think of them all as made out of silly putty and use two hands and then move it out of harm's way. I think sometimes, even though I do think it's really good advice to say, really take your time and think, sometimes we have to actually act and move things out of harm's way. And basically, you just have to use basic art handling that we teach to our grounds crew and the people in accounting, everything, because we assume they're going to be there helping us. So I would say, move those things out of harm's way and you grab the chair at its most stable place, which would be, I would take two hands and grab it around the feet of the chair so that you're supporting the legs and the arms and the back. You're not using any of them to grab the chair. And then just one kind of follow up that sounds like their biggest issue is that there's water in the walls and that is a potential source for mold. There's also no electric to run a dehumidifier. Do you have any advice you can get? Yeah, I was thinking more about that. And it sounded like in order to address the problem with the walls, they're going to need to get a structural person to do that. But in the interim, it might make, if there is a space that they can identify that once they've documented everything that they can just start moving away, the other possibility, if you could hang something that separates the collections from the wall so that if there is mold, it's going to be between a piece of plastic sheeting in the wall, not the collection, so that you can segregate the collections from where the moisture is on the wall. Great, Alicia, I hope that answers some of your questions and concerns. But feel free to type in the Q&A and we'll try to clarify if we can. I just want to interrupt again, I'm sorry. So we are likely going to go over our time here. We have just so much content to cover. But if you have to leave at 3, we completely understand there will be a recording of this entire webinar so you can catch what you missed. But I will let you guys pick up where you left off. If you're able to, I know I interrupted. No, it's all right. So you want to get a sense of what is the size and scope of the damage? This is still an artificial reconnaissance. Then you can get around to more specifically what about the collections and what was damaged. And in doing that, you're thinking about how you're going to deal with it. Have items been wet and how long have they been wet? Well, in instances of Sandy, they've been wet a while. And then the real concern is mold. I got a phone call on Sunday about mold and it was about avoiding the mold because it hadn't yet begun to happen, which is pretty amazing. But if you have good circulation or if you have things that are still underwater, you might not be dealing with mold. So there's so many alternatives. There's so many scenarios that can take place. And what we'll try and do is address those. But we're giving you a lot in terms of the preparedness and things that you would think about in terms of going in. Do you think that you can handle all this on your own? Are there people with enough expertise to be able to do that? Do you know where you're going to get additional personnel? Whenever there are prevailing hazards, I strongly, strongly encourage you to see if you have the funding to get help from an outside vendor. People who have experience dealing with situations that involve mold or other potential hazards. And I mentioned that with the knowledge that probably many of you don't have that luxury. But it's something that we should be contemplated in terms of long term, what is going to be the most cost effective way with dealing with this type of emergency. All right, you need space. You want to think, oh, that's all right. Well, all right, so you want to need space. Particularly this situation in New Jersey, if you're going to move those things, where are you going to move them to? How are you going to get them? And might you be at the point where you want to talk to the AIC search people and see if you can get some help? And along those lines, a very good point was brought up in the Q&A that know where you're going. Know that there's a clear path to transport these objects. And if you can, yeah, use carts. That's the best thing in the world to do. I think sometimes people want to help, neighbors want to help, and volunteers want to help. And they say, I'll take all the photographs and take them to my house, which might work really well. But just as we've said before, make sure that you document what goes where. OK, moving right along. OK, you want to determine vulnerability to the hazard. You may have items that were vulnerable and fragile and in a state of disrepair before the disaster took place. You want to take that into consideration. You want to take into the consideration what the current condition and damage to the object might be. One of the practicalities when water is with cellulacic material like books and papers and textiles, weight is going to play a big role. You want to think about, well, materials that are closest to me, I can address those first. So in terms of thinking about your order of retrieving material, there are a number of factors. And I think we have a slide coming up on that. But I want to also add that I kind of think about it as pick-up sticks. Because even though you might know that the hope diamond is in that room or in that pile of objects that are in the corner, you have to kind of go from the top down. And so be prepared to say, oh, that's the telephone book. Or those are pillows from my chair. And get rid of those. Or these can be replaced. But even though you have in your mind the priority objects, you're still going to have to deal with getting to those objects. I just want to make one comment in the chat box in terms of identifying the type of mold present. That is not a quick thing to do. In order to identify the mold, you need to get a culture. And probably you want to be moving to respond before waiting for that to happen. So as I said, basically we think of mold as being hazardous in general and take the greatest proportions assuming that it is a hazard. So you may not want to wait until a culture has been developed in order to determine what type of mold there is. I agree. So some salvage priorities. Well, we talked about vital records, vital institutional information. If an item doesn't belong to you, it's been on loan to you because it's from someplace else. That becomes a very high priority. You're responsible for someone else's materials. You want to talk with them about salvaging such items. You want to address items that directly support your mission, items that are unique or most valuable. And when we say most valuable, that doesn't necessarily mean monetary value. It could be valuable in terms of its importance to your institution. When you talk about unique, all materials in an archive are unique. That's the inherent nature of those materials. So then within those unique materials, how do you go about saying, well, we can't save everything. Maybe we need to think about the things that are most important, maybe some of that information can be garnered from other sources. Items most used are most vital for research. So that may be a high priority in some places. Those that are going to be damaged if left untreated. And finally, materials most likely to be salvaged. That is, can you go back to the slide just for a second? The other slide. In terms of priorities, usually the most damage is left to last because it's the three eyes that the exception to that is if you know that you're going to vacuum freeze dry or freeze materials all at once because they're all of equal importance, such as in an archive setting, you'd want to get those materials out fairly soon. If you know that is the route in which you're going to take. So even though often we say the most damage are left to the end, sometimes that's not necessarily the case. Look at your resources. This is pretty much common sense. And so we talked about a little earlier salvage priorities. You might want to divide it into salvage at all costs, salvage to prime permits, salvage as part of it. So there may be things that are going to be more vulnerable. Irons and cellular materials are vulnerable coded stock once it gets stuck together in terms of glossy publications unless they're frozen. You're not going to get them unstuck so that the more you know about all this, the better it's going to be for you. Do you have a location in which to be able to address your salvage operation? Do you have enough personnel available? Do you have the supplies? Is your space going to be adequate? You might find that as you go about retrieving materials that you find tight spaces. You have limited spaces. There are also some things that in normal circumstances don't come to your attention, but you want to be aware of those situations. Do you have enough light to be working where you're working? How do you get additional light? Those kinds of practical matters. And so triage priority items. And we talked about items of freezing. If you have running inks, things that are potentially mold, already mold has begun to appear. If you have coded materials, special treatment for a vendor, by the time large, if it's electronically related, that's not something you want to be handling on your own. So you want to get guidance from your vendor who, ideally, you've identified and communicated with in advance as part of your plan. Hillary, what do you do with something starting to mold? I would isolate it by putting it in not a bag, but a box. The bag is just going to create further the microclimate. So you want to isolate it and put it in a box, and you want to get it frozen. In order to address the mold, you have to dry it out in order to remove it. So something where mold is beginning to grow, I would anticipate that it would be kind of wet and slimy, as opposed to dry and powdery. So it's not in a situation where it could be dried out, unless you can take it outside and let it be in the sun, and the sun will dry things out. And then they could be vacuumed. Oh, that's a lovely picture. What is this a picture of? Something that we were just talking about. Is that mold? It looks like mold to me. Really? It almost looks like fire, yeah. It looks like debris, yeah. It is mold. OK. It is mold? Mold on records. Mold on records. That's pretty pathetic. Yeah, I would get is that's the kind of thing where I don't think I'd want to handle that in-house. I would want a vendor to handle that type of situation. Let them cart it off, see what they can do with it, and return it to you dry and without the mold. So I think this slide brings up a good point, that if you have certain kinds of collections that you're going to have to deal with, that you're not sure about how to deal with them, you can get in touch with AIC, and specifically AIC cert. And hopefully, the emails fly back and forth, and people volunteer to kind of take one-on-one discussion with different institutions about specific collections and problems. I'm moving on, Hilary. Here I go. Except that the picture, oh, I get it. They're hanging. That was an optical illusion there. So you're hanging paper-based materials, allowing them to air dry. You want to get encapsulations open. Don't assume that the encapsulations will protect your material, because water can get inside. However, if you are vacuum-free drying materials, you can weave them in the encapsulation. But so this is a nice picture of air drying. You can see that they're support. I'm assuming that this is on a table rather than on the floor, because if you can avoid it, you don't want to be working on the floor. You want tables. I can see there's some blotter paper absorbing the moisture. Underneath those blotter paper, I'm anticipating there's been plastic placed over the table so that the moisture is not absorbed into the surface. And you can see staining. OK. You could. There you go. In that picture, near the bottom. And that's something that probably is going to need to be addressed after the fact. Hanging photographic negatives and images, you want to be careful about how you hang them so that you're not damaging the image itself. Plastic closings are ideal because they sort of safe off the water. Emotion side is the dull side, so that if you're drying things out, you want to make sure the emotion side is up. And you want to be careful if you're stacking things that you're using some type of barrier so that the materials are not going to end up sticking to the blotter or the paper or whatever you're using to absorb the moisture. Wax paper can come in handy. Polyester, Halotex or Rime or something like that, which is a woven material. It's kind of like basting materials can be used. And this is an example of someone washing off CDs, which can be done. The issue is if the CD is unique, you probably want that eventually to go out to a vendor because you don't want to go and stick that into a machine because you don't want to be contaminating your machine. So the point was, yes, you can rinse them off. But ideally, you don't want to be using them. You want to send them off so copies can be made and you can be placing copies into your equipment. It may also be that your equipment needs to be addressed. In some instances, you might need to be removing the hard drive and sending the hard drives off to be restored by a professional. Now, go back. Go back. I'm told that this is a freezer unit. Go back to the freezer. And I'm a little bit puzzled by this because it looks like there is still shrink wrap around the items. And I thought that they would have cut that. Because sometimes they will cut your boxes open in a facility in order to get better air circulating around them. So again, it's important to work with your vendor and have things set out in advance so that you know exactly what's going to be done. You don't want to be leaving it to the decision-making of your vendor. So you want to have a clear roadmap for them to go on so that you're getting the most for your money. Understanding how you're going to be charged, if they're going to re-box materials and they come back to your facility and those boxes are not of the quality that you would like and then you have to pay for those boxes anyway. Maybe you want to address the specifications for what kind of boxes you want materials returned in. So there are advantages to freezing, flying large numbers of items, stabilized materials that are water-soluble. It buys you time. I mean, that's probably its most important aspect. It buys you time to make some decisions. It's going to render the mold inactive in terms of the mold will not continue to grow as it's being frozen, but it's not killing the mold. So you want to recognize that there are limitations there. And it allows you to recover things in batches so you can take things out a few at a time and unfreeze them and then go about air-drying the materials. So it's a stop-gap measure to be addressing material for freezing. Okay. All right, thank you guys. So let me just interrupt and just say all these resources, all these great links that everyone is posting in the Q&A, I'm going to go through and make sure that they're all included in our featured resource list, including that field guide assessment form. So as soon as this webinar is over, I'll be doing that, and you can see it in the community pretty soon. And we're going to get to some questions here, but first, let me go ahead and pull over our survey. If you wouldn't mind, please take a few seconds to fill this out. It really helps us shape our future events and kind of gauge how things are going. Now, Beverly and Hillary, I have a few questions for you that we didn't get to right away. And one is, again, from Alicia, she's curious. She thinks that the storage area has been affected as still the best place for these items because they are firearms and weapons. So she's curious if she does move them to the center of the room, how would you suggest documenting this to photograph the old storage locations and then photograph the new temporary storage? I think, well, if they're a new temporary storage setup, I don't know that you need to document that beyond having it in terms of the path that was taken. But I'm reading here that she says, can I move them to the center of the room? Yeah, once you've documented where they were and what the problems are, by all means. If that's something you're able to do, I think that's a great approach. And if it's important to you where they go, then document that. If our registrars, if I move things out of specific bins and just put them on the tables in the middle, they'd kill me. So if you can document that while you move them, that'd be great. Yeah, absolutely. The more you can be about specifics so you'll know where things go back after the path, the better you will be. Okay, and I think this is addressed by Gregor. So I just want to confirm we had Kate in Ohio who is curious about how fast mold can develop and will you always see it and know not to circulate? Okay, it's one of those depends, it depends on what the conditions are and what type of mold it is, what it's on, what it's suggesting, what its nutrients are. So there are a variety of factors involved in determining how fast it's gonna grow. The 48 hours is sort of a conventional wisdom thing. I've seen it take longer, I've seen it take less time. So the idea is that you want to be alert to that this is something you need to watch out for. And certainly what you don't wanna do is go spreading it around and cross-contaminating materials. So okay, there's how about developing a mutual assistance. That's a great idea with other museums galleries and your retail help each other. That's an excellent idea, Steven from Toronto, if you're able to do that, please go with that. Sometimes a lot of organizations have trouble with that because maybe they're government agencies or maybe the nature of their private agencies, but by having mutual assistance agreements that's a wonderful, wonderful approach. I wanted to also tell you that there are, and I think that this is in some of the information, there are templates both from the National Archives and the Library of Congress for working with contractors for setting up your contract for emergency response. So you wanna make use of some of those materials. Great, and then we actually, very early on, when you guys were discussing drills, we had someone in Fairbanks, Alaska, who was interested in hearing more about how to set up or run a drill. Beverly, I think you were discussing that a little bit. Can you elaborate a little further? Hi, I'm happy to. I don't know if Scott Carly is still on with us, but I would certainly get in touch with him. He's an AIC CERT member. But I tell you what, I've run drills where I've planned for weeks how they were gonna go and I've run drills where I've just really gone to the store and even kind of begged a bunch of junk and both of them work really well. I've had materials ready for people to use and I've had nothing ready for people to use. So make it really simple on yourself the first time. You can even just use a sink. You have to let, you have to convince these people, go with this drill, I know it doesn't look like wet collection, and they'll complain, but once they start, even this simple drill, and they realize, oh man, where are we gonna put this stuff? Wait, do we have any plastic? And they kind of naturally start to form a team. So I'm happy to talk to you about this or email about it, but make it really simple at first. And then you'll kind of structure your drills, how you want them to go. And don't let them complain at you, be strong. Thank you. They're complaining at you, I'm gonna complain at you Bev. No, I'm just kidding, I think it's really important that you are clear what kind of drill you want. Bev was talking about having drills for responding to wet type of material. I think that you also want to look at the bigger picture and structure a drill not only for dealing with the wet material, but how you would respond to the emergency and you want to take that out of your disaster plan. So once you've created your plan, you want to have a drill for enacting your plan. That's part of making sure that your plan works. So these are two different types of drills that we're talking about, and the more people drill, the more accustomed they are to what the drill entails and they're not petrified because this is a new experience and they think they're gonna be doing something wrong. So I encourage drills all around. Great, thank you so much. So I think we are reaching the end of our webinar today. I just want to encourage everyone, if you have a question that pops into your head after this, feel free, the discussion board is open. It is a great place to kind of air these questions and concerns and get feedback in a similar fashion. And again, that survey link is up there on the left-hand corner. Please take some time to fill it out. It really is helpful. I'm gonna plug our next webinar and just note, we've moved it from Wednesday, November 28th to Wednesday, December 12th at 2 p.m. Barbara Heller, who is the director and conservator of special projects at the Detroit Institute of Arts, will lead a discussion on policies aimed at protecting collections during special events. So just a note that it's been moved to December 12th. And also, this topic is of interest to you and you want to continue your training. Heritage Preservation is planning two free online courses about emergency planning and preparedness. One is in February 2013 and one is in March 2013. Just keep an eye on the ConnectingToCollections.org website in December for more information. And Kristen, I believe, entered in an email address if you want to find out more. It's just info at heritagepreservation.org. So all that will go up on Connecting to Collections in the near future. So again, feel free to fill out that survey for us and let us know what you thought. A recording of this webinar and all these fantastic resources you've mentioned throughout will be posted shortly after this conclusion. Thank you so much to our presenters, Beverly and Hillary. And thank you all to our participants if you are dealing with recovering after Hurricane Sandy. We wish you all the best. And please reach out to us for assistance. If you need it, we're here to help. Have a fantastic afternoon. Thank you.