BELLOWS FALLS — When a water pipe burst on Dec. 13, 2010, just above the Local History Room at the Rockingham Free Public Library, a greater disaster would have ensued were it not for the quick thinking of one librarian.
Historical and reference librarian Emily Zervas had only the previous spring attended a workshop in Montpelier.
The title? Emergency Response and Recovery of Wet Materials.
The Vermont Emergency Team for Cultural Institutions workshop was held at the Vermont Historical Society in Montpelier. Zervas was the only one from RFPL who attended.
Zervas's quick action, and knowing whom to call for help - information that was garnered at the seminar - saved nearly 400 books from being lost for good.
“You never think you'll get a call saying, 'There's water pouring into the Local History Room,'” Zervas said, “but luckily, I'd taken the training the previous May, and knew exactly what to do once I assessed the situation.”
First, the irreplaceable wet books from the Local History Room were shipped to Illinois to undergo vacuum freeze drying - a process where wet items are brought to a low temperature and then the moisture is extracted with a vacuum pump.
That was one of many steps taken to save the RFPL's collection.
The whole process was outlined by a representative of the Illinois drying and restoration company, a local paper conservator, a local bookbinder, and Zervas at a presentation at the library last week.
They showed what some of the books look like after they had been freeze dried and rebound, and the audience heard about how visual collections - including old photos, a map, and a watercolor painting - were saved.
A race against the clock
When she arrived at the library on that cold morning, Zervas said, she found “one section of books that had water pouring onto them, getting wet, but I knew we could get copies of those.”
“So I concentrated on the books we couldn't replace,” she continued. “I knew which pieces were most at risk and started with those. There were some looseleaf binders full of mimeographed sheets of genealogy someone had typed up and mimeographed themselves. I boxed those up first.”
There were other records, some handwritten and specific to local history, that had to be stabilized - and quickly. When it comes to saving records on paper, no matter how old, speakers said, speed makes all the difference.
“You have about a 72-hour window,” said Brian Russeau, a representative of the Illnois-based Polygon Group, one of only a couple of critical response companies in this country that dry rare collections on paper.
After 72 hours, Russeau said, nothing can be done.
“We've had four clients call us in Vermont in the last 10 days who had collections damaged by Irene,” he said. “It was too late for all those collections. Mold had already started to grow. They should have called us immediately.”
He said that his company owns one of the only vacuum freeze drying chambers in the country. “I think one of our competitors has one. They [the chambers] don't travel well. Theirs isn't working.”
The key in saving rare and irreplaceable volumes, Russeau said, is “getting them frozen.”
“Then you will have all the time you need to decide what your next step should be, whether preservation is worth it, or whether you want to try to save it yourself,” he added.
Exceptions, he said, are magazines and other materials printed on glossy, slick paper.
That paper stock has been coated with clay, which tends to lift in the drying process, and the pages stick together no matter what.
The process for coated paper involves constant oversight and changing of materials as moisture is wicked from the damaged pages, he said.
“Those are tricky and take time,” Russeau said. “It's better to do that process yourself.”
The freeze drying chamber, located in Chicago, may require three to six weeks to completely vacuum boxed crates of books with any moisture.
In that process, the paper is exposed to an environment starting at -40 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperatures are slowly raised to around 75 degrees. A gauge tells the technician when there is no more moisture in the chamber.
“The doors are sealed. We can't even open the chamber up until then,” Russeau said.
Fortunately for the RFPL, the company had a refrigerator unit in a tractor trailer in Massachusetts as part of a document rescue in process. It was brought to Bellows Falls within hours of the flood, so the library had a valuable head start in preserving its damaged rare books.
According to Russeau, it costs about $600 to treat three boxes of books, each about 1½ square feet, using the freeze drying option.
“It's expensive, and people have to weigh the costs against the value of the book,” Russeau warned. There are other methods, he said, but “none work as well.”
Help close to home
One of the first calls Zervas made was to Carolyn Frisa, the head conservator and owner of Works on Paper, located in The Square.
Zervas first met Frisa at the emergency response conservation training in Montpelier.
“I knew she'd know what to do, and she came right over,” she said.
“Emily was doing all the right stuff. She had it all organized when I got here,” Frisa said. “That saved so much critical time.”
Frisa took on several projects for the library, saving photographs as well as conserving a rare map of Bellows Falls from a Beers Atlas of Vermont that had suffered water damage. She also saved a watercolor by a local artist of the RFPL, a famous Carnegie library.
Frisa said the watercolor “didn't get a lot of water damage itself and was easier to save.”
But the Beers Bellows Falls map “was more of a challenge.”
“I could see previous acidity on the page, and then there was the water damage from the flood,” Frisa said.
The quality of the paper was better than she had hoped - “it was before they used a lot of wood pulp, there was still a good percentage of rag in the paper” - and it held together through an extended process.
That process might seem counter-intuitive: repeatedly soaking the paper in a solution of water until the acid is completely removed.
Several of the presenters, including Frisa, made note of a silver lining in being forced to apply extreme conservation measures to the library's collections.
In the case of the Beers Atlas map of Bellows Falls, the acid had caused discoloration and marks on the document, and it had made the paper brittle.
“I got rid of all the acid,” she said. “Now it's in better shape than before the flood.”
Several books could have the same said for them, Zervas noted.
Malcolm Summers, a bookbinder and owner of Chester Bookworm, said he and his wife, Ann, agreed to rebind about 40 books whose covers were too far gone.
“It took me a lot longer than it should have to rebind them,” Summers said with a laugh. “I couldn't help reading them as I was working.”
Summers held up a large (about 14 by 15 inches) thin book: a record of Rockingham soldiers and sailors who served and died in the “German War,” or what we call World War I today.
The book is now rebound in a tan weave with a leather spine, hand-tooled and embossed in gold.
“Obviously this was one of a kind,” Summers said, opening the book to pages that are filled with old-fashioned, spidery handwriting. “I felt honored to be [binding] it. But this was one I couldn't help read.”
He said one of the entries describes a local soldier who served and returned from the war, “only to go to Florida and die in an accident there. That's just so sad.”
“And that's just one of the stories,” he added.
Summers maintains a collection of supplies in cloth and leather dating from the turn of the 20th century, so “it was the right cloth and leather” for most of the books “for their time,” he said.
He reiterated that his job was made easier because the materials were of a time when “the quality of paper and sewing” was better.
“I didn't have to resew as many spines,” he said. “A lot of them were still good.”
Summers said that he has “the best job in the world,” because he comes in contact with so many rare and one-of-a-kind records and books, “and I get to read them.”
It took him about a month to rebind and sew 40 books.
“I work fast, because I'm neat,” he said with a laugh.
Zervas said once the books were frozen, she checked with Library Director Celina Houlne and made sure insurance would cover the next steps in the rescue, conservation, and repair of the local history collection.
With no hitches, she was given the go-ahead.
Now, nearly a year later, the Local History Room is awaiting a last-minute touch-up before the better-than-ever collection of local history books is returned to their shelves.
In the bigger picture, Houlne said, the library will undergo a $2.95 million renovation, a project approved by voters earlier this year.
Construction is expected to begin in April 2012.
Information on upcoming fundraising events, youth programs, an online library catalogue, as well as details about the flood and aftermath, can be found at the library's website.