Fire Chief David Van Holland said flames were seen coming from the roof and the east front window of the structure when firefighters arrived after receiving a report at about 4:15 a.m., according to the July 24 Sioux City Journal. It took one-and-a-half hours to bring the fire under control.
“It’s horrendous,” Library Director Karen Bjorkman said in the July 24 Des Moines Register. “It’s worse than I thought it was. They let me walk through just a bit ago. We’ve got books where the covers are actually melted together. The glass is all blown out from the heat.”
The blaze destroyed 21 computers, including four that were not yet removed from their boxes, and an undetermined number of the library’s 40,000 books, including one of four copies of the popular new Harry Potter book. “Fortunately the other three are somewhere out in the community at this minute,” Bjorkman said.
Posted July 28, 2003.