The Somme Departmental Archives are closed to the public until further notice. And for good reason: a pipe break in the urban drinking water supply network led to flooding in the five basement levels of the main site, i.e. the conservation stores. The flood took place on January 11 and 12.
Heritage documents affected by water
“This disaster affects all levels of the premises where heritage documents are kept: 210 meters of documents, including 100 meters directly affected by water damage, were evacuated.” we explain to the Somme department.
The disaster affected several areas of conservation areas as well as around a hundred meters of heritage documents, notably archives from the period 1790-1940 including registrations, land registers, municipal administrations, military affairs, teaching, and archives from the period after 1940.
And to continue: “The water flowed through a pipe at the first basement level and then spread through micro-cracks in the ceilings on the lower floors.”
Drying operation at the Departmental Archives
From now on, the archives teams are mobilizing to preserve the documents. “Wet documents are placed in all available work spaces to allow them to dry and thus limit the development of mold as much as possible. In the coming weeks, drying operations, monitoring (sanitary status control) and regular handling (sheet by sheet) of all documents that are still damp (registers/bundles) will continue to ventilate them as much as possible. The priority objective remains to dry out the damaged documents and prevent a general infestation of the evacuated collections. However, great vigilance must be maintained in the coming weeks. In order to devote ourselves to this sensitive mission, the building is closed to the public until further notice.“
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