Oh, man. They say that a practicum is going to be full of unexpected challenges, and that's pretty much the point of it, but you don't really expect curveballs this size. The reference section flooded this week! Let's learn about water damage and preservation on the fly, shall we?
When I came in to work at the beginning of the week, I noticed (sadly not right away) an odd discoloration of the carpet over in one corner of the library, where the fiction section ends and the reference section, specifically the part with the atlases and historical volumes, begins. I went over to peer at it, wasn't sure what it was, and eventually ended up touching it and realizing it was a splotch of damp. The kind that is apparently already spread in a two-yard radius, and that causes liquid to bubble up when you press down on it. Uh-oh.
A quick survey of the surrounding area showed that there didn't seem to be any water coming down from the ceiling or through the wall (or if there was, it was behind the shelves where I couldn't see it), which meant it was likely to be coming from the floor. Double uh-oh; just what everyone loves to see, possible structural integrity problems. The principal was not excited to find out about this at 8:00 a.m. on a school day, but random flooding waits for no man.
Since several hundred pounds of delicate reference books is not a great thing to have resting on top of a soggy, possibly unsound leak somewhere in the building infrastructure, I spent most of the morning moving things off the shelves and onto tables across the room, moving the expensive free-standing SmartBoard that was parked in the same area, and setting up shoestring cordons to keep students out of the area. The reshelving process will not be an exciting one, but I'd rather reshelve the whole section than have to throw some of it away or pick any of it out of a damaged floor.
Which totally sounds like an overdramatic worry, except that about an hour later the ceiling collapsed in the music room directly under that part of the library, where the flood had now spread to about four yards of carpet and literal standing water in the lowest part of it. Luckily, the library floor didn't go with it, but it was a dramatic morning for everyone. Around this time we found the source of the problem: the sink in a nearby janitorial closet had apparently accidentally been left running since the previous afternoon while no one was there, which was briefly blamed on youthful hijinks from the middle school students before being confirmed to be a staff mistake.
So, the good news: it wasn't a leak in the sense of a damaged pipe or anything! But the bad news: there's still water everywhere. I'm not sure what the plan is for the music room ceiling downstairs (good luck to them - I was a music major in singing back in the day and a ceiling/damp problem is the worst possible thing), but we've set up a portable dehumidifier and several box fans around the area, and are hoping that the wood damage to the shelves won't be too bad. It looks like it never got deep enough to do much more than discolor the wood, and the carpet - assuming we can get the parts of it under the shelves to dry, which I'm a little worried about - should return to normal if we can dry it out faster than mildew can set in. So it looks like a few days of monitoring the situation and hoping for the best.
If there is insurmountable damage, which I sincerely hope there is not, we'll have to divert some budgeting away from acquisitions to try to manage the situation, but one step at a time. For now, the plan is to keep kids out of the squishy part of the library and figure out how to keep the reference volumes intact!
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