Laserfiche WebLink
<br />Impact on campus was reported by John Morris (1997), Manager of Facilities Operations. <br />. over 200 faculty, staff, students heavily impacted (for some it was their lifetime <br />work) <br />. over 60 graduate students, some with families, lost possessions and were displaced <br />from the Intemational Center where they lived on the west side of campus. <br />. over 40 buildings had some damage, especially support systems which tend to be in <br />the basements <br />. all the textbooks for the Fall 1997 semester were destroyed <br />. over 425,000 volumes oflibrary books were destroyed <br />. hundreds of thousands of work hours were required to get the campus back into <br />condition <br />. total damage was well over 100 million dollars (about a third for the library <br />collection, another third for facilities, and a third in areas such as loss of business, <br />relocation costs, contents of buildings, personal loss of individuals) <br />. $2.25 milllon in time and effort spent on flood recovery for cleanup, relocations, <br />replacements, security, and similar items (through February 6, 1998, telephone <br />conversation with Janice Lenihan, Business and Financial Services) <br /> <br />CSU had to respond rapidly during the flood, such as dealing with an ongoing student <br />conference with 3,500 participants, but the major work came later. Morris reported that <br />from his initial phone call, for the next three to four weeks, sleep was a precious <br />commodity. During the first week the Facilities Department was frantic to get a student <br />conference group out and another group in. Within a week the university was able to <br />hold another conference for about 5,000 students. <br /> <br />Facilities instituted an emergency management team. As the originally planned site for <br />the Control Center had been destroyed, another had to be organized, Five immediate <br />priorities were established: protect health and safety; respond to personal and <br />professional losses of staff and faculty; resume classes as soon as possible (the university <br />only missed about two days of summer semester); help clean up; and prepare for (and <br />minimize the disruption to) the Fall Semester, <br /> <br />The morning after the flood, Facilities began the major effort of draining water and <br />restoring the functionality of buildings, It took two or three days to start bringing down <br />the water level within some buildings. Facilities estimated that they pumped well over <br />five million gallons of water. They had to verify the structural integrity of the buildings, <br />(fortunately, there were no structural problems other than a floating floor in one building <br />that was easy to repair). They had to determine not only cost estimates ofthe damage, but <br />essential systems such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning, electric systems, <br />elevators, and building alarms. A basic level of security was required, Document <br />recovery was important and one safe with well over $1,5 million in promissory notes had <br />to be rescued.. Packing the library books became critical because the books would <br />deteriorate biologically until frozen. The university anticipates recovering about 80 <br />percent ofthe books that were lost but it will take two to four years, and it is still <br />unknown what the success rate will be, A new book costs $70-90 dollars, and a book can <br /> <br />13 <br />