My heart goes out to all involved in the loss and recovery in Cologne. Back  
in 1985, the house of a prominent history professor emeritus burned in a fire  
that swept over sixty houses in San Diego, California. I took my entire field 
 crew and a few volunteers out to sift through the rubble thinking we might 
save  a few charred documents. We did not have a good plan, though our hearts 
were  stout, and when we came to all the materials he had on the floor we 
learned the  fire under the house blew the water pipes at precisely the same moment 
the floor  collapsed. We found thousands of documents and had to quickly pack 
them in boxes  and rush them to a place to drip overnight, then off to a huge 
meat freezer, and  finally a taxidermist freeze drier. Everyone worked for 
free and it was a  frantic time. I recall we found cooled pools of silver, where 
his China cabinet  incinerated. But perhaps most amazing was the singed 
filing cabinet. As I pulled  open the top drawer, a small alligator lizard with 
singed scales crawled out  looking very angry! Two years later, we learned that 
we recovered about ten  boxes of archives documents and thirty boxes of his 
taxes, hobby stuff, and bill  paying records. Before he died, the salvaged 
material had been scanned and  donated to an academic archives.
 
Ron May
Legacy 106, Inc.
 
 
In a message dated 3/8/2009 4:00:23 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,  
[log in to unmask] writes:

They've  started clearing out some of the material from the archives; we were
doing  triage in a big warehouse for a company which specializes in removing
toxic  waste & rubble & various other "difficult" materials. Some of the  dry
material was simply repacked and shipped off somewhere in sturdy  boxes;
damaged material was put into cardboard file folders to keep it flat  until
it can be looked at properly, and the wet stuff wrapped in plastic  (one end
open to allow it to breath) & shipped off somewhere else  (presumably to be
freeze-dried). Overall, the whole operation was  well-organised and
professional: they have experience from the Anna Amelia  library fire of a
few years back, and they had a few days' time to get  things ready before
anyone was allowed into the site to start rescuing  anything.
But this was just the start, and the stuff we saw today was  probably in some
of the best condition: not deep down, under the  groundwater. And even with
the heavy rain today, a lot of it was  dry.
Still: some things like medieval town charters had simply  shattered...
In addition, there was a lot of material from the neighbouring  houses
brought in, which had to be searched through, trying to separate any  stray
archival material from personal effects, & setting those off to  one side.
For me it was a lot like sorting through some of the rubble I  excavated in
Dresden, but more emphasis on trying to preserve someone  else's privacy (I
just collected stuff & put it all in boxes for  someone else to sort).
Still: overall we're lucky: only one confirmed &  one presumed dead. There's
a high school across the  street...


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