disaster recovery firms

[Richard Boyden <richard.boyden@sanbruno.nara.gov>]

Greetings: here's an item about Disaster Recovery Services and
BMS Catastrophe, BPL and CO State that may be of interest

FW Firms Save Books after Soggy Disasters:  Specialists Use
Freeze-Drying to Stop Damage
By Laurie Fox
Dallas Morning News 
August 26, 1998

FORT WORTH - Whether it's a soggy city record in flood-ravaged Grand
Forks, N.D., or a dripping, bloated book soaked in a main break at the
Boston Public Library, Kirk Lively and his crew of cleanup artists are
there to try to save it.

When the floodwaters from storms or other natural disasters recede
from public buildings and private businesses, the specialists from
Disaster Recovery Services get busy loading all manner of paper-based
products into refrigerated trucks.

The company and another Fort Worth firm, BMS Catastrophe, are two of
only three in the country who use the process of freeze-drying to save
water-damaged books and documents, said officials with the Library of
Congress.

In the trucks, the documents and books turn into blocks of ice, which
almost immediately stops the damage done by water. The items are then
freeze-dried in special tanks and, most often, can be restored to preflood
condition.

"The quicker we can get to these files and books, the better the chances
that we can restore them," said Mr. Lively, vice president of Disaster
Recovery Services in East Fort Worth, which is freeze-drying library
books from Boston and Colorado. "People have a special attachment to
books and a specific need to have their records restored. People are
usually happy to see us, especially when we tell them that we can
minimize their loss."

Art Dunphy, a spokesman for the Boston Public Library, said library staff
were devastated when a 42-inch city water main broke Aug. 16 and
flooded the library's basement.

"We're now hopeful that most, if not all, of those that we lost can be
completely restored," he said. "It's wonderful that technology has moved
into this area. You just don't think in terms of damage of this magnitude."

While working on yesterday's catastrophe, they plan for tomorrow's.
Both companies have dispatched crews to flood-ravaged Del Rio and to
the East Coast to assist in the aftermath of Hurricane Bonnie.

"We track hurricanes and often notify our clients ahead of time," said
Don Haggard, national account manager for BMS Catastrophe, a division
of Blackmon-Mooring Steamatic, which was founded in Fort Worth. "We
watch the weather, and we see it coming; the people who call us don't.
You have empathy for people because it's heart-wrenching when you
see historical documents that seem to be destroyed."

Until the last few years, both companies specialized in cleaning, repairing
and restoring commercial buildings after flood or fires. And while only
about 10 percent of their business comes from freeze-drying, it's often
the biggest challenge.

"It makes sense to save these items if we can," said Mr. Lively, whose
crews are cleaning and freeze-drying 40,000 books from the Boston
Public Library and another 500,000 books from the Colorado State
Library.

The freeze-drying chambers, each about the size of a tractor-trailer, can
hold about 10,000 books at once. The books and records enter the
chamber much like dry ice. A vacuum is created to allow the moisture to
"sublimate," or go directly from the solid to gaseous state, never allowing
the books to actually get wet.

"The technology we used even five years ago is now outdated," said Mr.
Haggard, whose company has worked to restore records and files from
the flooded Grand Forks, S.D., buildings, the Texas State Capitol and the
giant Brambles Records building in Chicago. "In some cases, we can
move records in and out in 10 days."

The library books can take a few weeks, depending on the number of
pages in the book, Mr. Lively said.

Chandru Shahani, chief of the preservation research and testing division
of the Library of Congress, home to one of the country's original
freeze-drying machines, said the technology is becoming more readily
available.

"It's very useful because these collections can be expensive to restore,"
he said. "The sad thing is that a lot of people don't miss these books until
they're gone. We're never going to digitize everything so we have to
protect the items that we have."
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