Tulane University Library
When Hurricane Katrina roared through New Orleans in August of 2005, few parts of the city were left untouched by her devastation. Though massive flooding was understandable near the banks of Lake Pontchartrain and the levee breach at the 17th Street Canal, the thought of Tulane University flooding—sitting miles away on (relatively speaking) high ground—was far from the minds of most New Orleans residents.
However, unthinkable occurrences took place during those dark days and parts of Tulane, one of the nation’s premier universities and an important part of the city’s heritage, did flood. The campus sustained water damage on the first floors and basements of two thirds of the buildings on the uptown campus, all of the buildings in their downtown campus and others scattered throughout the area. However, university officials were distressed to learn one of the most problematic areas was their beloved Howard-Tilton Memorial Library. While no water had reached the first floor, the basement was a different story.
Totaling approximately 40,000 square-feet, the area had about 20,000 dedicated to library materials—some in normal stacks and some on compact shelving. Housed here were valuable music collections (books and scores), important government documents, microfilm and more—all of it fully submerged in eight feet of water. Understandably, school officials feared all was lost; however, university leaders had luckily acted quickly and called the nation’s leader in document restoration services, BELFOR USA. No stranger to large-scale restoration projects, BELFOR brought in an army of skilled team members to immediately begin work on this most challenging project.
“New Orleans after Katrina was the biggest single restoration project in company history,” stated Theresa Williams, BELFOR USA Director of Marketing and Sales. “We were working on 62 buildings with varying degrees of damage and that’s just on the Tulane campus in Uptown New Orleans. We had 25 more, for a total of 87 that operated within the Tulane System spread out across the city and the region with over a thousand people working on all of them.”
BELFOR’s manpower, massive resources and technical expertise along with their organizational skills and time-tested process proved to be a valuable asset for Tulane, especially in regard to the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library.
One of the most important first issues was to get power to the campus, whether temporary or via generators. BELFOR’s team immediately went to work restoring the house mechanical and electrical systems. Concurrently, hundreds of generators, dehumidifiers, and air conditioners were brought in to immediately power other buildings and deliver ambient control to their upper floors, which prevents humid conditions that encourage the onset of mold and additional deterioration.
At the library, BELFOR moved quickly and went to work immediately pumping the water. With the water gone, the BELFOR team met their first of many challenges. They found the basement storage featured a combination of compact shelving and regular library shelves. The compact shelving had absorbed water and was not operational, so it had to be demolished and removed one shelf at a time to retrieve all the materials. Library officials worked to prioritize the most important of the lot and BELFOR was able to retrieve about 12,000 boxes of critical documents plus another 8,000 boxes from the archives building next door. All told, the boxes included about 120,000 bound volumes as well as manuscripts and unbound materials.
The items were immediately placed in freezer trucks to suspend further deterioration and then moved to commercial cold storage facilities to keep the documents in suspension before finally coming to the BELFOR Document Lab in Fort Worth, Texas for treatment. The processing protocol included thorough washing to remove all silt; drying; sanitization; and a gamma radiation treatment to kill all contaminants. Then, all items were sent to Tulane’s bindery partner, Heckman Bindery in Indiana, for re-casing. The documents were then sent to back to BELFOR for quality control. A checklist prepared by the Tulane library team was used and if the materials passed the QC checks they were then ready to prepare for return shipment and could finally be returned to Tulane’s recovery center to put back on the shelf.
“One of the other unique challenges we faced was the overall environment in the wake of Katrina,” stated BELFOR Senior Project Manager, Kirk Lively. “New Orleans had a severe lack of resources like food, shelter and basic supplies. There were no freezer trailers in the Southeast because they were being used for food and medical supplies, so we had to bring them in from other parts of the country. The logistics of getting our people in to New Orleans each day from over a hundred miles away and through military check points limited access and work time. It was definitely a difficult environment.”
While the documents were being treated, BELFOR crews worked to clean and restore the library. BELFOR’s quick action in providing refrigerated, dry air to the top portions of the building meant the library’s first and upper floors escaped damage from mold and deterioration.
Selective demolition and mold remediation took place next. BELFOR followed a formal protocol for mold remediation developed by a third-party industrial hygienist firm hired by the university. This protocol requires verification that all mold and mildew has been removed before replacement of sheetrock and carpet can begin. In the final stage of the construction process, BELFOR crews completed the build out of the dry wall, then cleaned and prepared the rooms to be returned to their former state or better.
By the end of November, great strides had been made across the campus and students were beginning to return to prepare for the next semester. Ultimately BELFOR met its goal and Tulane, including the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, was open and ready to serve students in the spring semester of 2006.
BELFOR www.belfor.com