A pipe in the drinking water network broke during the weekend of January 11 and 12, upstream of 61 rue Saint-Fuscien in Amiens, address of the Departmental Archives of the Somme. The consequence: flooding in the five basement levels of the main Archives site which correspond to the conservation stores.
«The disaster was noted on Monday January 13 during the first requests for consultation from users of the reading roomcommunicates the departmental council. The water flowed through a pipe in the first basement and then spread through microcracks in the ceilings on the lower floors. Several areas of conservation spaces were affected, as well as around a hundred meters of heritage documents. These are archives from the period 1790-1940: registration, land register, municipal administration, military affairs, education, and archives from the period after 1940».
The five partially flooded premises were therefore cleaned, with 210 m of documents evacuated on Monday. Among these, 100 m of documents were directly affected by water damage. The department’s teams mobilized to preserve them: “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“. The services hope for a rapid reopening.
