Flooding Closes Library
at University of Maryland
Flooding caused by a break in a water main running under the University of Maryland/College Park’s Hornbake Library shut down the facility for a week, but damage to the library’s collection was relatively minor.
The flooding was discovered by campus police around 3 a.m. on August 30. Firefighters spent nearly seven hours pumping the water down a nearby storm drain.
Harm to the library and its collections was modest, noted Lori Goetsch, the library’s director of public services. The two inches of water barely spared materials on the shelves, with the only damage occurring to boxed items in transit to the ground-floor storage area and in the Library of American Broadcasting archives. “If there had been another half-inch of water, we would have been in trouble,” Goetsch told American Libraries.
A week after the flood, some 300 items were drying and 31 boxes were in dining-hall freezers awaiting salvage. No cost estimate of the collection damage was available, Goetsch said, but the university thought the overall damage to the building would run up to $2 million.
Posted September 11, 2000.
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