This article about school library books destroyed because of a fire drives home one of the topics of my Preservation and Conservation class, disaster preparedness. In this library, a small fire in a reptile cage caused the sprinklers to go off, drenching thousands of books. Unless they can dry overnight, they will have to be discarded. This is a hard hit for an elementary school library, and insurance will not cover all the losses.
The library or school staff may not have thought very much about the repercussions of the sprinkler system and what would happen to the books if it did go off. What are the costs of another extinguishing system vs. replacing all those books? This incident is proof of my professor's (Gary Menges') words: "It's not if a disaster occurs, it's when."
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