When disaster strikes...

Twelve years ago, Norwich Central Library was destroyed by fire. No lives were lost, but documents and manuscripts held by the County Record Office in the building suffered terrible damage. Graeme Burton met with a team from the Norfolk Record Office to hear about the immediate rescue effort and the long road to recovery.

By Jessica Twentyman and Graeme Burton

Enterprise Information (EI): The fire that swept through the Norwich Central Library back in August 1994 was, by all accounts, ferocious. Do you now know how it started and how it spread?

Norfolk Record Office (NRO): The fire broke out in Norfolk Central Library very soon after attendants entered the building in order to open up for the day at about 8.20am. We’d had very hot and humid weather in the preceding weeks, and, because of the layout – the library was built around an open courtyard topped with a glass roof – a lot of hot air had built up. These were perfect conditions for a fire to start.

We discovered later that some days before the fire started an electrician was working on the ground floor of the library. He found that one of the lights in the bookcases was in a dangerous state. There had been some amateur repairs to it [in the past] and the insulation was crumbling. He reported the problem to library employees, the message was passed on to administrative staff, but by the time the message had reached the admin assistant who dealt with such things, the urgency of the problem was no longer clear from the message. Somehow, it fell though the cracks.

So on 1 August 2004, when attendants unlocked the building and heard the fire alarm, they went to the area of the library in question. When they opened the door, they said, it was like an ‘explosion of fire’.

EI: And how did events unfold from that point?

NRO: The fire spread fantastically rapidly. Because there was a roof on the quadrangle and a build-up of hot air, the fire didn’t have to work its way around the outside – it spread straight through that space. Plus, the air conditioning blowers weren’t linked to the fire alarm system and kept going throughout the fire, creating a blow-torch effect. Shelves were wooden, rather than steel like today, and rooms were wood-panelled. Once the fire got going, it completely consumed the structure of the building.

It’s fair to say that a lot of areas of risk that we discuss regularly now should have been addressed back then, but in those days, Norwich Central Library was no different from other central libraries in terms of risk management. We hadn’t written the book yet, because we hadn’t had a major fire!

EI: How was the Country Record Office, part of the Central Library building, affected by this disaster?

NRO: The Record Office was situated in the basement beneath the Library. That, at least, was fire-proofed. The damage in the basement, however, was caused by water, rather than fire. As the fire service battled to put the fire out upstairs, water poured through air ducts into the basement. That water was boiling hot, and also polluted, as a result of charring in the main Library. Documents were, in effect, boiled.

In total, about 10 per cent of our records were damaged and one per cent were very seriously damaged. That was, potentially, a tragedy. The records that we hold in our collection date right back to the eleventh century – we have extensive early medieval records that continue in unbroken runs through the centuries. It’s a unique and very valuable collection. The earliest of these records were held in strongrooms, others in a more general repository.

The damage to our collection varied from staining to more serious problems, where volumes that had sat in boiling water were badly warped and their leather covers had turned to concrete. Many of our parchments, too, were extremely distorted.

EI: Ten per cent of the collection seems quite low, given the scale of the disaster. How did you manage to protect so many of your documents from any type of damage?

NRO: The simple fact is that a high percentage of the documents in our archives were boxed. A good quality archive box will absorb a vast amount of water before it allows its contents to get wet. As soon as we could get into the basement, we were removing boxes that were absolutely sodden and imagining the contents would be similarly water-logged. But we found that, in most cases, only the volumes at the tops and bottoms of boxes were affected.

The other advantage of the boxes was that they provided us with convenient, portable units to get multiple volumes of documents out of the building and into temporary accommodation. In that way, we saved on wear and tear to documents and on transportation as well.

EI: Once you had assessed the extent of the problem, how quickly did your recovery plans kick in and what measures did you take? Did you have a formal disaster-recovery plan?

NRO: By mid-morning on the day of the fire, the then senior conservator got into the Record Office with the fire brigade and began covering shelving with polythene sheets to protect documents from any further damage. From then on, it was simply a matter of sheer physical endeavour: getting out what you could, when you could.

That was a challenging time. One day, you’d be evacuating a particular part of the strongroom and the next day that area would be deemed unsafe – and therefore inaccessible – by the building surveyors. We had no office accommodation and were just putting records out in the yard. The county archivist had a table out there, where she sat at a makeshift desk in a hard hat, using a mobile!

In terms of a disaster recovery plan….well, we had ‘first aid kits’. These were basically traditional deed boxes containing rubber gloves, sponges, archive tape for repackaging, archive-quality pens and labels and half a dozen acid-free folders. This was pretty standard fare in the archiving world of that time. And we had access to plans for the strongrooms and location lists for documents. Staff were pretty aware of what was necessary under the circumstances, although no-one was prepared for them. It was a question of sheer magnitude.

At that time, disaster plans rather assumed that you’d be in control of events, that at least part of your premises would be useful, that you’d have telephones, and so on. We had virtually nothing and there was a lot going on that was entirely out of our control.

In terms of magnitude, this was a world-class disaster and it was always going to be beyond any normal disaster plan. Where we were extremely fortunate was that we had a dedicated team of archivists and conservators with a very clear view of the task ahead of them – recover materials as quickly as possible, with a focus on retention.

We were also lucky in that local businessmen offered us what was essentially a wastepaper warehouse to use as temporary accommodation – it might not have been ideal for archives in the long term, but the point was that, in the short term, it gave us somewhere to put them.

The team spent three weeks on the rescue effort – locating archives and carrying them from the building. That involved paddling through dirty water in the dark and wearing protective clothing that was hot and uncomfortable in the very hot August weather. In the end, we took out 12.5 million items in about three weeks – it was a brilliant effort by any standards.

EI: What happened to documents once they were removed?

NRO: One element of the disaster plan as it stood, which worked really well, was a subscription to Harwell Drying and Restoration Services, a company in Oxfordshire that specialises in salvaging and restoring paper-based materials. In the immediate emergency rescue phase, they were right by our side, freezing wet documents on the spot and then taking them away to be vacuum cleaned. They took care of the one per cent of documents that were seriously wet.

Dealing with the rest of the archives fell to our team of archivists and conservators. Much of the training these employees went through in order to qualify for the job involves collecting and receiving documents in far-from-pristine conditions. Items may have spent decades in the damp vestry of a church, for example, by the time an archivist gets hold of them. Records frequently arrive wet, dirty and infested – so we were adequately skilled to deal with the bulk of our records, even if the scale of the job was massive.

The books were air-dried where possible and maps were hung up on washing lines. Once they had been dried, these documents were moved into the temporary space in the waste-paper warehouse that had been donated and, after about ten months, we moved into an office space in Gildengate House [a large, empty office building in Norwich which was acquired on lease by the County Council as temporary accommodation for the Record Office] in 1995. Once there, we began a massive conservation survey to assess what was damaged and needed work to restore it. By 1997, we were ready to start that conservation programme in earnest.

EI: How do you go about conserving the dried documents?

NRO: We work carefully, we use only ionised water and we test the inks used on the document to see if they will run, prior to cleaning. It’s a painstaking task. To date, we’ve conserved around 85 per cent of the materials damaged by water in the fire.

The oldest documents are not necessarily the most difficult to conserve. What we often find is that they prove the toughest in terms of resisting damage. In fact, it’s modern inks that are more prone to running. In general, two types of inks were used in the Middle Ages – acid ink (which uses gallic acid and actually ‘burns’ the letters into the material of the document) and carbon ink, (which is likewise pretty permanent). And while pre-1850s paper is usually pretty good, more recent equivalents often prove less robust.

Parchment, however, raises many different issues. Basically, it’s skin that has been de-haired, thinned and stretched on a frame to make it into a sheet that can be written on. When parchment gets wet, it tries to revert to its original shape. And if it gets too hot, it crinkles like a crisp packet on a radiator.

Where parchments had been rolled and then got wet, they’d dried into the roll shape and were difficult to open. In the end, we used some of the insurance money we got to buy some specialist kit to deal with parchment, a humidification chamber and a suction table. You can’t re-wet the parchment, but you can humidify it by exposing it in the chamber to a light ultra-sonic vapour [in effect, cold steam], which makes it relax and allows conservators to open it. The suction table is then used to pull down the parchment and hold it flat, enabling them to do their repairs. The parchment is put into a press or under a weight for a month or so in order to acclimatise it, so that it stays flat.

EI: You now all work in a new Archive Centre adjacent to County Hall in Norwich. How did you go about rebuilding the Record Office in its new location?

NRO: Well, luckily, our insurance was up to date. But the interesting thing in cases of this kind is that you spend a lot of money on document restoration right from the start. So my advice to archivists and conservation specialists is to know the size of your insurance excess, because essentially, you’ll spend all that on upfront rescue and conservation, even before you go to the loss adjusters.

Archival materials are original and thereby, in a sense, not insurable – so if material had been burnt and lost in our fire, there would have been no claim for that. The claim was for conservation and recovery.

Also, don’t get carried away by thinking that the insurance will pay for a whole new building. If you have an old banger and you crash it, you won’t get a brand-new BMW out of it. As it happens, we were lucky to be awarded funding of more than £4m from the Heritage Lottery Fund towards the construction and fitting out of the new Archive Centre. It opened to the public in November 2003.

EI: What can you tell us about the lessons that were learned, in record-keeping terms, from this experience?

NRO: The design and build of the new Centre owes much to the lessons learned from the fire. The repository, for example, complies fully with BS 5454 [British Standard 5454, an archival standard for the storage and display of records]. It is a high-security facility, built to a density that creates a condition of high-thermal inertia within the building.

That means it won’t heat up or cool down quickly in different weather conditions. But it also has full air conditioning that complies with BS 5454, too. A sophisticated fire detection system is linked to an automatic extinguishing system that uses Argonite gas. In the event of a fire, this gas floods the strongrooms and reduces the oxygen content below 12 per cent.

The Archive Centre is completely dry – there are no wet services in any area where original documents are used. We have CCTV cameras throughout. We tried to make surveillance unobtrusive in public areas, so that the environment doesn’t feel unwelcoming to visitors, but at the ‘back of house’, security is far more visible. You need swipe cards to move from one area to another and, when you get to the repository itself – the Fort Knox part of the building – you need real keys to get in as well.

For incoming documents, we have a document reception suite. This stops materials that are damp and/or infested with mould from mixing with the rest of our archives. It’s a cube of four rooms with interlocking doors, and as a whole, that suite serves as a quarantine area.

In particular, the first room acts like a ‘triage’ room in a hospital accident and emergency department. It’s there we assess the condition of documents and what forward steps need to be taken. There’s also a freezing and drying room for wet documents and a cleaning room for dirty documents. Once the preparatory work has been done, a final room provides the area where documents are laid out, arranged, sorted and listed. They are then packaged for preservation and sent on to the strongrooms or the conservators, where necessary.

EI: Do you have any other advice that may be of value to other people working in a records environment?

NRO: Right now, only a handful of repositories can boast the same level of facilities that we have here. But whatever the circumstances, one always needs to be aware that something could happen and realise that, when a real disaster strikes, your best-laid plans may not be up to dealing with it.

You need to have plans, of course, for the most likely accidents, such as water pipes and minor fires. And to deal better with bigger disasters, you should develop networks of people that might be able to help. One thing, incidentally, that we had to find out was where we could get a seriously large quantity of polythene sheeting at short notice.

In any event, you should keep written details of where to get help and keep that contact list up to date – we’ve got ours locked in a box in a safe external location.

Of course, the world has moved on since 1994. If something happened now, much of the information we would need is held on computers. So we take all sorts of precautions with these systems – we have solid business recovery plans in place and regular back-ups are taken and held off-site.

On the whole, we were extremely fortunate not to lose any records in the fire – and to gain so much experience as a result of it. Others in the archive world have been able to learn from that experience. And if it had not been for the fire, we would not now be sitting in what’s been described as the most modern archive building in Europe!

To contact county archivist Dr John Alban and his team at the Norfolk Record Office, please e-mail norfrec@norfolk.gov.uk