Flood Recovery

Index

Updates

Recovery Stats

Return Rates

Book Recovery

OPAC Status

Causes & Prevention

Flood Photos

Articles

The February Flood of 1998: Causes, Recovery & Recurrence Prevention Michael A. Keller The basic facts are well known. During the night of 2-3 February, heavy rainstorms in an El Nino season flooded parts of four of Stanford's library buildings: Braun Music Library, Cubberley Education Library, Green Library, and Meyer Library. Stories of the disaster and the immediate responses were transmitted in reports from the Stanford News Service; in the Stanford Report, the Stanford Daily, and in Bay Area news media. There was a powerful response from library staff, from various campus agencies, and from students who were called in to assist, in the early morning hours of Tuesday 3 February, in forming "bucket brigades" to move wet books up from the lower level of Green Library East. Within about 15 hours, 4,000 boxes of wet books and personal papers had been shipped to a local cold-storage facility for freezing. Once the books were placed in a state of suspended animation, appropriate methodological and contractual decisions could be determined for their restoration. Generators, desiccating machines, fans, pumps, water-watch patrols, and security provisions were put in place for the duration of the immediate response to the disaster. Ruined carpeting was removed within 24 hours, interior walls opened, furniture and computers dealt with, power-system components tested and replaced, and the worst of the mud and debris removed using specialized extraction techniques in more than 12 acres of library spaces in four buildings. A variety of campus agencies and numerous contractors, insurance officials and consultants, and service providers were engaged beginning in the wee hours of 3 February; their work continues to this day. Green, Meyer, Braun, and Cubberley were closed for a week and then reopened in stages. Restoration work on the buildings and on the collections will continue for some months. Three detailed "updates" were promulgated to the campus community via the campus media and the SUL/AIR (Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources) web site (at http://www-sul.stanford.edu/). I will focus on three aspects otherwise not well covered: What caused the disaster? What key factors made possible the swift and effective response to it? What is being done to prevent a recurrence? The Disaster Successive rainstorms in the winter of 1997-98 had, by February, left the ground saturated; any rain falling after the first of the year was not absorbed, and became runoff. In January, the area got about 8.15 inches of rain; the 30-year average rainfall for January is 3.04 inches. In February, the area got about 11.62 inches of rain, of which 4.63 inches came in the first three days of the month; the 30-year average rainfall for February is 2.5 inches. So, a lot of water came out of the sky. Strong on-shore winds, thanks to El Nino in the evening of 2-3 February, prevented the tide from leaving the Bay. This meant that the storm drains and runoff creeks were backed up and could not drain the watershed normally. At Stanford, rainwater runoff poured down out of the faculty housing areas via Mayfield Road toward Braun Music Building, which, by its orientation more or less on an east-west axis, serves as a dam between the flow from Mayfield Road and Lasuen Mall. The water penetrated Braun either through a faulty underground membrane or through the window frames of the light well in the north side of the building or both. The water continued to pour down both Lasuen Mall and between Braun, the Post Office, and the Bookstore on the West and the Law School on the east toward Cubberley, Green Library, and Meyer Library. Green Library is situated in a similar way to Braun, but in addition forms with Cubberley a right-angle dam to water flowing downhill. At the corner where Green and Cubberley meet, there is a single, small drain which carries ground water to a sump pump in Cubberley's basement. Debris brought by the early rush of water clogged the drain openings and, in any case, Cubberley's sump pump was overwhelmed, thus allowing the basement of Cubberley to flood. The water pooled at the corner of the two buildings, then washed over the moat around the stack area of Green Library West into the basement of the building, still under construction. Between Green Library East and West at the basement level are only two penetrations, each protected during the construction by "green board," a kind of superior wall board with water-resistant properties, commonly used in bathroom walls now. When the water in the Green West basement reached a level of three feet or so, the pressure on that green board in the southerly of the two penetrations was sufficient to break through the green board and gush into a succession of rooms in the lower level of Green East, ultimately breaking through the wall of one of the sorting rooms and flooding the entire lower levels of Green Library and Meyer Library. Meyer was treated to a couple of additional streams of rainwater through the intake and exhaust vaults to the west of the building flanking Rodin's The Thinker. Naturally, power went out in Green as the main transformer was soaked; the main power grid in Green stayed out for a week with emergency power provided first by a gas generator in Meyer and subsequently by a series of large mobile generators brought in by contractors. Key Factors First, our early warning systems worked, though one of them was quite coincidental. Richard Koprowski, Librarian in the Archive of Recorded Sound, was in Braun Music Library at his desk in the basement and noticed water seeping along the floor. About midnight of 3 February, he called Barbara Sawka, the Head of the Music Library, who in turned called me to alert us. About the same time, our motion detectors in Green Library detected the on-rushing water; our security service called Don Intersimone who in turn called me about ten minutes after I had received Barbara's call. I was thus able to get to Braun by a few minutes after midnight, divert the water coming into the basement to the lower mechanical room, and proceed to Green. Second, our annually updated Emergency Response Manual was put to work immediately. On arriving at Green, I made a couple of calls which resulted in the activation of the telephone tree. I also made two other calls, not prescribed in the manual, which activated three important campus agencies. I called Geoffrey Cox, the Vice Provost for Institutional Planning, telling him that we needed a lot more assistance than we in the Libraries could provide ourselves. He in turn called Chris Christofferson, the Head of Facilities Operations, and Marc Wais, Dean of Students, to call up resources at their command. Geoff Cox also immediately came down to Green to help me assess the situation and continued through the night to make sure that whatever was needed and available was provided. My second call was to Michael Rosenthal, Head of Capital Planning and Management, who in turn called the contractors working on Green Library West and got them to call out their work force immediately. Bill Krill and Mike Needham of Barnes Construction arrived shortly and got their subcontractors and staff activated to work on the Green Library West side of the problem. Activation of the SUL/AIR staff brought more than 70 staff during the early morning hours. One of the first to arrive was Karen Nagy; she in turn called her daughter Monika who arrived with the first contingent of students. Their calls and those of Marc Wais brought the successive waves of willing Stanford students over the course of the next 15 hours. John Gallagher and Julie Hardin of Facilities Operations were detailed by Chris Christofferson to work with our facilities personnel in the disaster recovery efforts and did their share of slogging through the mud and muck. Third, Stanford long ago made a commitment to a strong Preservation Department in the Libraries. Eleanore Stewart, Maria Grandinette, and Walter Henry, along with all of the rest of the department staff provided technical advice, managed processes including the "bucket brigade" of students, and circulated constantly to check climatic conditions and assure adherence to appropriate practices and techniques. Without them and their willingness to work very long hours, the recovery would have had much less salutary outcomes. Fourth, the SUL/AIR staff and those of the other campus agencies and the contractors were ready and willing to do what was needed, when it was needed, often acting independently to attack local problems. SUL/AIR line staff, specialists, administrators, and managers took charge of their areas and made contacts as necessary to mobilize resources to deal not just with the flood itself, but with the provision of service when daybreak occurred despite the flood. So, for instance, Jerry Persons, Head of the Library Systems Office, got a 1KW generator and enough extension cords to power up the server needed to get the essential SUL/AIR servers up and running so that all the other campus libraries could use on-line resources. And when my stalwart, Maureen Davidson, saw the extent of the problem and the numbers of people working on it, she persuaded the good folks at Andronico's Market at the Stanford Shopping Center to prepare breakfasts for one and all; she ended up organizing catering for all staff and contractors for the first week of the recovery with Marnie Furbush's help. Staff from virtually all of the campus libraries and even visiting librarians from Brigham Young University pitched in as needed and with nothing but willingness to tackle whatever tasks were presented to them at the moment. Without fear of repeating myself, SUL/AIR is staffed by an army of generals, but generals willing to become yeomen if such a transformation is required. Fifth, President Gerhard Casper and Provost Condoleezza Rice conveyed authority through Geoff Cox and Jeff Seilbach, Director of Risk Management for Stanford, so that a speedy and effective recovery was recognized to be of paramount importance. Geoff and Jeff were on hand for daily meetings in the first week to assure coordination of efforts among the numerous agencies, representatives, and specialists gathering around my conference table. Sixth, when called out of their dorms early in the morning of 3 February, Stanford students came to Green, worked effectively and with good cheer, then departed when tired so that others could take their places. They organized themselves, took direction well, and allowed themselves to be relegated to drudge work so that SUL/AIR staff could undertake more complex tasks. The motivation of the students and the resident fellows who came in with them was inspiring to all of us. Seventh, throughout the immediate actions and into the longer term of the response to the flood, students and faculty bore the privation to their studies, their teaching and research overwhelmingly with good cheer and sympathy. Emblematic of this was the brief serenade by the Stanford Band mid-day of Tuesday 3 February. Prevention Chris Christofferson has engaged a civil engineering study of the campus storm drain system. The study and recommendations emanating from it will undoubtedly lead to changes in the ability of the campus infrastructure to cope with a similar storm in the future. SUL/AIR's Emergency Response Manual will be updated and refined based on the experiences of this disaster. A new drainage system has been devised and will be constructed in the basement of Green Library West. Additional protective measures, like raising the level of the moat on the south side of the stack area, will be undertaken. We will all be more alert to predictions of oncoming storms; but, as the San Francisco Bay Area was the first landfall of this giant storm, we will continue to depend upon the national weather service and its ever-improving systems to advise us on pending disasters so we can pre-position our forces more effectively. Final Words Document Reprocessors, Inc., the freeze-drying company chosen to treat the 4,000 cartons of books, has sent a test batch which gives us strong hopes that the vast majority of the soaked volumes will be returned in usable condition by the end of the summer. By the first week of April, readers were permitted into the areas of the four libraries affected by the flood. As of early May, Braun and Cubberley are in good shape, while furniture and some equipment in Green and Meyer are still not in place. The February flood of Stanford's libraries was an event anyone would want to avoid. However, given the event, I cannot imagine and have not seen anywhere previously a more effective, powerful, "can do" response. The disaster will have cost many readers valuable time in the affected libraries, will have cost Stanford and its insurers lots of money, and will have harmed to one degree or another a great many of Stanford's books. On the other hand, it proved, once again, to this valiant band of library staff how strong they are in character and in capacity to overcome adversity and to serve Stanford magnificently. Michael A. Keller is University Librarian and Director of Academic Information Resources.