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Re: Water damage



The organization I worked for at my last job had a similar experience. The building had a flat roof (we agreed to lease the building while it was being built, and I started right away pointing out that a flat roof was not a good thing in a snowy region, but no one listened). There was an air conditioning unit on the roof, and apparently there needed to be more flashing or something around that unit. We preiodically had leaks in a particular area, and the owners of the building kept fixing them. Finally one Monday (of course) we came in to discover a leak in a nearby, different area that had collapsed the suspended ceiling and dumped water on a very expensive folding machine. A few feet further over, and it would have inundated a collection of books, as well.

People from the NY State Library used to do disaster workshops for us periodically, and they had two good stories. One had to do with a roof leak where the water ended up in a light well. The person who told about this had to put dye into the water on the roof to prove that this was where the water was coming from.

The other one is much more dramatic. The NY State Library is in a tall building (eleven stories??), and the library is on three of the upper floors. They had a sprinkler system that was fed by water directly piped in from the Hudson River. One day a pipe burst in the sprinkler system, causing water to cascade in. At this point, I can't remember if it actually hit books or not, but it was running down several flights of stairs in a stairwell and out to a sidewalk on a hill, where, since the temperature was below frezzing, it was freezing and making things interesting for pedestrians.

The majority of the disasters that I have been aware of in our region have involved pipes that burst, usually over weekends, and in one case, although the pipes burst in an open stacks area, it was over a storage area on the next floor down that people did not go to on a regular basis, and it took a couple of days for people to realize that this area had gotten wet as well.



Christine Crawford-Oppenheimer
Special Collections Librarian/Archivist

Culinary Institute of America
1946 Campus Drive
Hyde Park, NY  12538
(845) 451-1757
c_crawfo@culinary.edu

>>> Raymond LaFever <rlafever@MAIL.NYSED.GOV> 05/11/01 06:29AM >>>
I can attest to this type of water damage because it happened to me when I ran a local government records center a decade ago.  

This led me to think about the whole issue of ceiling tiles.  I did not see the need for a suspended ceiling in the records storage area but it was put in anyway.  What the suspended ceiling did was tend to hide a leak until the tile got too heavy and collapsed under the weight.  Without that tile, I would have probably detected the leak much sooner, though I got good at detecting bulging ceiling tiles.  Sometimes that worked but sometimes it happened too quickly and over a weekend or something like that.  I ended up putting plastic over everything because the ductwork was constantly springing new leaks.  Fortunately, a few years later, the whole operation was moved to a much drier site.   

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