When I wrote my last post, Quite a Day, I did not know that the newspaper office had been flooded and rendered unusable.
I got there the next day, Thursday, August 13, to find that at least 18″ of water had flowed through every room in our building. It had moved furniture across multiple rooms, flipped over our refrigerator, and soaked through desks, filing cabinets and supply rooms. Pretty much everything was ruined.
We spent the rest of the day wandering through the dark building trying to salvage some of the most critical items. Bankers boxes, plastic tubs, towels, storage unit, trucks, gloves, masks, fans, squishy toxic muddy gross scrambling.
That salvage effort included our printed and bound newspaper archives. A professional archivist gave us the advice to get the soaked volumes in a freezer as soon as possible, so we found a local museum that was willing to displace some frozen roadkill specimens in the name of trying to preserve written history.
On Friday, we shifted back in to newspaper publishing mode to work on our coverage and editing articles to get our next print edition ready.
We spent the whole weekend back at the office, trying to get as much stuff cleared out as we could before mold started to set in. Files, equipment, personal effects, cables, monitors, kitchen supplies, old storage. I made what felt like a million decisions an hour about what to throw away, what to try to dry out and save, what goes to the storage unit, and more. I watched the mold grow on what had been my desk as we worked.
My team and several community members have been amazing, jumping in to action to help for long hours in a terrible working environment. Many acts of kindness and offers of help, big and small, came our way. Outside our doors, the broader community was also in high gear, helping, serving, caring. It was beautiful and sad and inspiring.
There’s still a lot more to do. Not to mention more coverage to report, more photos to take, more stories to tell, and a print edition to get out the door.
Leave a Reply