Emergency Preparedness for Libraries. Julie Todaro
• Individuals (staff violence includes vandalism, armed/combat, threats)
• Individuals (nonstaff violence includes vandalism, armed/conflict, and/or combat and threats)
Natural Disasters and Libraries
Natural disasters can affect library buildings, surrounding library property (parking, outdoor venues), the infrastructure that supports delivery of library resources and services (communications, etc.), as well as library constituents, library staff, library partners, and—in general—the use of the library for typical transactions as well as use of resources and services to assist in emergency and disaster response and recovery. Natural disasters can occur within a library only, within the community where the library resides, or they can occur in and affect the library’s umbrella organization and larger community.
Earthquakes
Earthquake activity and the impact of earthquakes or earthquake activity exist in many locations in the world. In some locations, residents experience major impact that affect buildings, building infrastructures, and transportation structures, while other locations experience more subtle changes connecting to library resources or changes to buildings that are infrastructure, more so than visual devastation. Libraries—housed in a wide variety of buildings and locations—are obviously not immune from damage and destruction and not guaranteed to survive given the assortment of physical locations. Due to expenses of repairs and recovery, libraries must focus on assessing risks prior to activities, identifying potential issues for resources and services, insurance with reasonable deductibles, and repair and recovery processes.
Fires: Forest Fires, Wildfires, Buildings/Ground Fires
Obviously fires can be natural disasters or man-made disasters. The effect of fire can include—for libraries—major destruction of buildings, destruction of collections, repair and/or recovery of furniture, repair and/or recovery of hardware and software, and conservation of a collection with diverse formats/resources that have smoke, fire, or water damage. These types of damages can occur when environments suffer full-blown fires and/or when environments suffer smoke damage from fire, smoke damage from smoke nonfire related (burned-out ballasts and lighting), and water recovery. Related damage may take place in waterlogged materials in the form of mold, mildew, and related pestilence. Although all damage is critical, fire and smoke damage has so many overlapping elements; it is often considered the emergency most difficult for recovery.
Landslides
Although landslides are not an everyday occurrence, and one would think they typically occur only in certain environments, they can happen in a much broader variety of locations given climate, weather, and climate change—both hot and cold including extreme heat and lack of moisture as well as ice and thawing, building and development including soil use, and design and placement of earth/soil, erosion, and other natural disasters such as earthquakes. Landslides can invade libraries and ruin building infrastructure and related infrastructure including transportation and communications. Repair and recovery, insurance, conservation due to water, and mud damage—as with so many other emergencies and disasters—overlap, so as to identify and draw attention to problems.
Pestilence/Pest Control
Pestilence is typically used to identify widespread contagious or epidemic disease; however, pestilence is also used to describe a destructive parasite which could include an insect infestation as well as a mold or mildew that infects an environment or resources within the environment. Libraries often have pestilence infesting resources and buildings which can be caused by building conditions that may or may not be caused by other emergency or disaster conditions. Library books and other library resources such as media or realia may be infested with insects or mold and/or mildew, and these might be brought in by constituent care (or lack thereof) of resources as well as water from the environment as well as—for example—water introduced for fire recovery.
Although pest control appears to be a simple answer, it isn’t. Elements complicating treatment or control include the following:
• Local, state, regional, or federal laws may limit or even prevent pest control for reasons that include both legal and biological terms such as endangered, threatened, imperiled, and at-risk species.
• Pest control contracts for some states and institutions are handled by county and vary in delivery. That is, an institution may have service areas that span several counties and thus may need to have a different approach to pest control in each county. In addition, unique pest treatment may be handled differently within the same geographical area; that is, law enforcement may have to handle endangered, threatened, imperiled, and at-risk species, while regular control may happen through contracts with companies.
• Pests that can be removed may be defined differently in different environments and thus have different treatments.
Volcanic Activity
Although this emergency/disaster is least experienced by the general population and libraries, clearly destruction from this activity might be fire—either directly or indirectly—heat, smoke damage. or water repair and/or recovery. Many volcanic disturbances are coupled or overlapping with earthquakes and/or earthquake conditions; therefore, as with other disasters, recovery might be overlapping as well and could include infrastructure destruction, fire, smoke, heat, and water recovery.
Water: Dam Failure, Floods, Tsunami, Recovery from fire
Water is the great element of recovery as well as a destructive force. Given this dichotomy, water—no matter where it comes from—both hurts and heals. That being said, rainwater and/or natural water is treated differently (and the resources affected by it) than water that comes from the ground and filtered through other environments. Obviously, other water factors include the amount, the length of time the water is present, the temperature of the air/water throughout the emergency, disaster and/or recovery, and the resources themselves including the type of paper, the age of the resources, resource packaging, the age of packing, any other packing materials, and the nature of emergency and/or disaster. Clearly, the presence of some water signals complete devastation with no hope for resource or building recovery (major floods—no matter the cause), while other water factors provide a variety of avenues for partial or complete recovery.
Weather: Cyclones, Droughts, Heat, Hurricanes, Thunderstorms, Tornados, Typhoons, Winter
Weather—never easy to predict—amid massive changes due to climate changes is considered a primary twenty-first-century major issue in emergency and disaster recovery and management. Administrators and managers find it hard to prepare for expected weather, much less the unexpected weather conditions of today that include unusual heat, thaws related to heat, erosion related to climate, dust and wind conditions, body of water and “body of water to land” emergencies, and disasters such as hurricanes, tornados, typhoons, and thunderstorms. And unusual weather also includes snow and the damage of snow on the land to name but a few other conditions. Obviously, the weather and climate itself (water, heat, wind, etc.) can have an enormous effect on buildings and resources as well as recovery processes. While administrators and managers understandably tend to focus on the major emergencies and disasters and their recovery, attention should be paid to environments that—lacking climate control due to older facilities, costs, and so on—have “creeping” problems for staff, constituents, and resources due to spiking hot and cold temperatures. These conditions can cause pestilence problems and destruction of all formats of resources and can also cause the destruction of infrastructure of buildings due to expanding and shrinking soil and building elements.
Man-Made, Nonnatural Disasters, and Libraries
Civil disturbances, Conflicts, Terrorism, and/or Wars
Library and information environments—as all other institutions—are affected by the political and social forces that surround them. Although many libraries throughout the United States might not necessarily be directly affected by civil disturbances, conflicts, terrorism, and/or war, as we move into the twenty-first century we see increasing activity in these areas and the likelihood of staff or staff families being affected by these events is great. In addition, these events affect publishing, access to