Library Races Against Time to Save Books

In a race against time, officials of the fire-gutted Los Angeles Central Library began packing up the first of hundreds of thousands of water-soaked books on Wednesday, trying to rush them to a cold-storage warehouse for freezing before mold or mildew forms on the pages.

The massive effort is one of the largest book-salvaging campaigns in American history, according to Peter Waters, the conservation officer of the Library of Congress and an expert on the salvage of water-damaged library materials.

Salvage experts who toured the library said it appeared that roughly 80% of the library’s 2 million volumes were saved in Tuesday’s blaze--a finding that cheered those who had feared a greater loss after watching fire and smoke fill most of the aging building for six hours. Officials credited firefighters, who took quick action to throw scores of plastic covers over book shelves, with limiting water damage.

Another quarter of the collection--between 400,000 and 500,000 volumes--was left in perilous condition, soaked by thousands of gallons of water that firefighters sprayed inside the building.

Of the remaining volumes, most appeared to have suffered minor water or smoke damage, while a smaller number escaped the fire’s effects, officials said.

Eric Lundquist, president of a document preservation company hired by the city to supervise removal of the books, said the soaked volumes must be frozen at zero degrees Fahrenheit within 48 hours to assure that mold or mildew will not form.

Months from now, when the city decides where it will store those books, they will be slowly blown dry in an enclosed tank over a period as long as two weeks. The drying process will restore them to room temperature without subjecting them to damage from precipitation. Smoke residue can then be lifted off with chemically treated sponges, Lundquist said.

However, the number of soaked books in the Central Library is too great to enable them to be frozen within 48 hours, said Lundquist, president of Document Reprocessors of San Francisco, the nation’s only company with mobile pressurized trucks that both freeze and blow-dry soaked documents.

“I don’t think it’s possible to get everything under control” within the specified time limit, he said.

An associate of Lundquist, Robert Ritchie, estimated that removal of the soaked books will take five days, forcing library officials to make difficult choices about which volumes they most want to preserve.

As he surveyed the fire scene Wednesday morning, Lundquist hoped that some of the books could be put into storage that day at a Vernon cold-storage facility that has agreed to handle the library’s stock temporarily.

Work Delayed

Several dozen library department heads and other employees showed up at 9 a.m., ready to help with the task. However, because of delays in restoring electrical power to the library, the staff members were not able to enter until late in the afternoon, and were able to do no more than load some damaged books into heavy cardboard boxes marked “wet” or “dry.”

Today, hundreds of library staff members are expected to assist the department heads, forming small teams that will be able to pack 10,000 to 15,000 boxes of books each day and ship them to Vernon on large trucks.

A California State Library preservation officer, Teresa Silva, said officials believe that it might take two weeks before all books are removed from the library. She said the sorting, packing and shipping will continue 16 to 18 hours a day.

Once they have trained enough “crew leaders,” library officials plan to solicit public assistance in the book-salvaging program.

Lundquist, whose biggest previous salvage job involved 90,000 books soaked during a university law library fire in Canada last year, said his freezing-and-drying technique is 90% effective.

Handling Is Crucial

He said the handling of the books during packing is crucial to their preservation. Because mold growth can be reduced if the books are frozen tightly together, staff members must remember to keep the volumes squeezed as tightly as they were on the shelf, he said.

To pay Lundquist, the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved a $51,500 contract and $450,000 for other salvaging expenses.

Meanwhile, a New York architect who is planning an extensive interior redesign of the Central Library as part of a city expansion program said Wednesday that the fire damage will not permit the library to reopen before the remodeling begins.

Norman Pfeiffer said the remodeling is scheduled to begin in late 1987 but that the library cannot be repaired by that time.