This week we continued last week’s flood salvage, but in some ways, it felt more like the calm after the storm. There was not the same chaotic energy there had been the week before when we were trying to get everything out of the water. So, with calmer minds and without facemasks taped to our faces or the overpowering smell of mold hanging in the air, we started to look through the items we had set out to dry.
Some of our salvage efforts worked well:
Loose-leaf paper we had interleaved with blotter and laid flat to dry looked good.
Some of the books that we interleaved with blotter paper dried out very well.
A phone charger we had put in rice to dry was fine and was able to charge a phone.
The photographs mostly stayed in the condition they were in when we took them out of the flood. If the image had been damaged, it obviously stayed damaged and those photos are now just dry and damaged. But the photographs that didn’t have damaged images when we removed them from the flood dried out very well and look quite good now.
Unfortunately, not all of our salvage efforts worked. This week, like last, involved throwing a lot of things out. Some of the items were simply too damaged by the flood, and we could not fix them. For example, the ink ran on some of the blueprints and manuscripts we flooded, and some of the photographs were too damaged by the flood for us to save them.
More interestingly, some of the salvage failures were due to our own actions. Going through these items was a great way to reconsider what we would do in a future flood. Some of our biggest problems were:
Books drying in weird shapes. We were very focused on getting books spread out to dry but we sometimes contorted books into convoluted shapes, and we did not replace the blotter papers often enough, so many books retained their weird shapes as they dried.
Book pages sticking together. One of the books was made of clay-coated paper, and because we left blocks of pages closed together, they dried that way and are now stuck together.
Damage to the panel painting while trying to clean it. The biggest area of damage to the panel painting is in the bottom right corner. That damage is not from the floodwater but from the pressure from the clean water we used when we tried to rinse the painting off.
Finally, we also looked at the electronics and media we flooded. We didn’t get a chance to test them to see if they still work, so we won’t know the extent of our salvage success or failure there until later. We did dissect the computer we flooded in order to remove the hard drive and found some interesting things there. As we took apart the computer, we found that the battery had leaked and there was mold growing inside the computer.
We removed the hard drive and are letting it dry, so time will tell if the data can be saved. We also noticed a possible downside of the rice-drying method if we had wanted to save the entire computer. Rice stuck in the ports on the side of the computer and in some areas started molding. It looks really difficult, if not impossible to clean, so this is something to think about if you wanted to save a whole device, and not just the hard drive inside.
While we continue salvaging our flooded objects, we will prepare for our next disaster: the fire. In a couple of weeks, we will simulate a fire in a small house museum. We will take a collection of items similar to our flooded objects to the Austin Fire Department’s training facility, and set up the items in a small room also known as a “burn cell.” A small fire will be lit in the room and allowed to burn for a predetermined amount of time. The fire will be extinguished and we will see what we can save!
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