Library Fire : Restoration of Books--a Massive Job

The process of defrosting, cleaning and reshelving more than 1 million books damaged by water or smoke in the Central Library fire will be more massive, complicated and expensive than the salvage operation that saved them, according to restoration experts who are preparing to bid on the job.

A critical variable will be whether the outpouring of volunteer help that was mustered in removing books from the library last week can be duplicated and sustained during the long process of cleaning and reshelving the books in a new home.

The job may cost as much as $4 million, according to Eric Lundquist, a San Francisco salvage expert who has been the city’s consultant in the removal of books from the building since the April 29 fire.

Largest Operation

Lundquist is one of several document-reprocessing specialists who will soon submit bids to the city Library Commission for what is viewed as the largest book drying and cleaning operation ever.

According to various estimates, it could take from two months to the better part of a year to repair and shelve the Central Library’s collection.

That work is not expected to begin until library officials find a building with approximately 250,000 square feet to house the collection. Central Library Director Betty Gay said she hopes a site can be chosen within a few weeks.

The library will stay in temporary quarters for several years while a $110-million project to renovate and expand the old library--planned long before the fire occurred--goes forward.

The first task in restoring the collection will be to dry out 700,000 soaked books that are now in cold storage warehouses. The storage costs the city about $1,000 a day.

The city expects to select a contractor who will use large vacuum chambers, equipped with pumps, to draw the moisture out of the books--a process that can take as long as two weeks. In addition to specialists like Lundquist, aerospace corporations that have similar chambers to test the durability of aircraft parts may bid for the job.

“The books could be dried in as little as four months, providing there were enough people on the receiving end to clean them and shelve them when they came out,” Lundquist said.

It is that part of the effort that will require precise coordination to avoid a logistical disaster in which partially cleaned or improperly catalogued books are returned to the shelves, the experts said.

No one may know what the logistics of dealing with so many books are, according to Don Etherington, a book preservation expert from the University of Texas humanities research center and one of several consultants who flew into Los Angeles to advise Lundquist and city officials. “Nobody’s that experienced with something of this magnitude,” he said.

Smoke Damage

What will have to be assembled is a crew large enough to process thousands of books each day for months at a time. The inventory to be handled includes not only the wet books, but another 600,000 dry, smoke-damaged ones that were saved from the fire and are now at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The city has been given permission to keep them there until mid-June, Gay said.

Lundquist said that if he had the contract, he would recommend that a staff of “300 worker bees” be assembled to clean and reshelve the books. That level of manpower would allow 10,000 books to be processed each day, requiring a bit more than four months to handle the 1.3 million volumes, he said.

Tim Smith, loss estimator for Blackmon-Mooring, a Fort Worth company that plans to bid on the library contract, said he believes the cleaning could be accomplished more than twice that fast.

Volunteer Help

Either way, the effort would probably require considerably more manpower than the Central Library’s 250-member staff, many of whom will be pursuing their normal administrative tasks. Gay said she hopes to avoid having to hire more personnel by seeking volunteers.

“People have been so generous with their time,” Gay said, referring to participation by as many as 1,500 volunteers in clearing the library of damaged books. “We’re hoping we can count on that again.”

Smith and other experts stressed that quality control will be paramount. For example, some books with smoke damage will have to be cleaned on every page, not just on the covers. And library officials earlier this week estimated that as many as half of the water-damaged books may have to be rebound--a cost that Smith estimated at between $10 and $30 per book.