Although the C.H. Booth Library Children’s Department remained closed to the public, as of Monday, February 23, Library Director Brenda McKinley had a positive outlook on the imminent reopening of that area, badly affected by water damage last Tuesday, February 17, when frozen sprinkler system pipes burst.

“I would say it’s weeks,” said Ms McKinley, as opposed to the months it took to reopen the library after the January 2014 flood. “J.P. Maguire [remediation company] is moving so quickly.”

New carpet and ceiling tiles are already ordered, she said, and workers from J.P. Maguire were busy disassembling shelving in the Children’s Department, moving furniture out of the way, and packing books not water damaged into boxes. The books will be housed in a climate-controlled warehouse while work is being done, she said.

Once that task is accomplished and the new carpet tiles received, the carpeting can be laid and furnishings replaced. Ceiling tiles in the immediate vicinity of the leak will be replaced, but other than that, there is just a small amount of drywall that was damaged.

“The books are the big thing. It will take a little while to fill in the books that were destroyed,” Ms McKinley said.

Although 10,000 books were lost to the downpour of water over one section of the Children’s Department, Ms Bennison is grateful that the rest of the collection has been saved. In the hours immediately following the flood that quickly filled the aisles with three inches of water, it appeared that the entire collection of books was at risk.

The dry winter environment set up a perfect situation, she said, for the books to absorb the sudden influx of moisture in the air, wrinkling pages and creating the potential for the loss of many more books.

“J.P. Maguire got the wet carpet out quickly and anything near the floor [last Tuesday],” Ms Bennison said. That, along with a constant flow of dry air from heaters and giant dehumidifiers placed throughout the department has saved those books from permanent damage, she said.

“Still,” Ms Bennison rued, “it is a great loss.” Many of the books that had to be thrown out are irreplaceable. It is the nature of children’s book publishing, she said, that many books quickly go out of print.

“We lost most of the fiction in the P-Z section, and a lot of the children’s non-fiction,” she said. All of the biography section was lost to water damage.

The up side of the disaster, said both Ms Bennison and Ms McKinley, is that the water damage was very localized, allowing the rest of the library to open to the public last Thursday.

“A very limited selection of children’s books have been moved to a little section on the second floor, for now,” Ms Bennison said.

Programs are being rescheduled for different areas of the library, many of them to the meeting room, across the hall from the Children’s Department. Ms Bennison suggested patrons check the library website, www.chboothlibrary.org, for updates concerning any programs.

“We are not looking long-term this time, to reopen this department,” said Ms Bennison, but patrons will have to be patient.

“Consider what it takes to move and then replace thousands of books. That takes a while, but these guys [from J.P. Maguire] have been rockin’ and rollin’,” she said.

“The staff has been amazing, too. They are digging in,” Ms McKinley said. The five clerks that assist Ms Bennison have been working with staff in the cataloging department on ordering, are handling the programming, and will help with processing the replacement books when they arrive.

Insurance adjusters continue to investigate the root cause of the pipe break, Ms McKinley said. “It is being investigated very thoroughly and every inch of the library is being looked at.”

No fines for children’s books will accrue while that department is closed to the public, but children’s books can be returned, to the main circulation desk, on the second floor.