Librarians walked into a surreal atmosphere in the General Coll
ection on Saturday morning: a lake of standing water, fed by a cascade between the adult fiction shelves and the public computers, surrounded the reference desk and computer islands. Computers were quickly covered in trash bags and shelves of books were moved out of the area of greatest danger.
A huge thanks goes to the Madison Fire Department and Trent Munns, our first responder, who helped get out the water-logged ceiling tiles and helped prevent further damage.
Our next r
esponder was a roofing expert who looked around and found absolutely nothing wrong.
Then, Advanced Cleaning and Restoration came, located the source of problem, and quickly
fixed it. It appears that the drain pipe designed to carry water from the roof had come dislodged, and all of the water funneling towards it simply fell through to create our lake.
Since the
n, there’s been a lot of drying going on with towels, shop vacs, and blowers. New ceiling tiles are up and things look fairly normal. Only 43 books were lost at an estimated cost of $900. 
What else needs to be done? We still need to replace the damaged books, insulate around the pipe, and fix some damaged drywall. And of course, our poor director has a mountain of paperwork.
All said, i
t could have been much, much worse. If the center of the cascade had been a foot off in either direction, either our computers or hundreds and hundreds of books would have been lost. We have been very fortunate because of the placement of the leak, the great people that have helped throughout this difficulty, and the patience and understanding of our patrons. Thank you.