“It’s been like this since last May… it’s been like this since we got all the water out,” says Miriam Andrus, the Director of the Grace A. Dow Memorial Library.
She points to different watermarks throughout the lower level of the building, each one more astonishing than the last. Each one more devastating. What used to be the children’s area filled with picture books, games, stuffed dinosaurs, and a toy train perpetually running above our heads… it just looks like a war-zone now.
“Folks don’t understand how FEMA works,” she said. “You know, you think of your homeowners insurance company and before they agree to take you on, they see that this is the size of your house, you own a pool, etc. Well, FEMA is like your insurance company, except you’ve lost all of the things they’re supposed to pay for so then you have to prove what it was that you had, but you don’t have it because it all got thrown away with the flood or the fire or whatever the case may be.”
She reiterates: It’s like trying to get your insurance company, which isn’t your insurance company, to pay for something you can’t prove that you had.
“It’s quite a process, I mean we’ve poured through thousands of photographs trying to find things that we had down here that got damaged that got thrown away after they got flooded.”
Ms. Andrus said they’re shooting for a January 2022 re-opening to the public. By that time, all of the planned projects should be completed and proper health standards met with the new boiler room systems and equipment in place.
“(During the last flood) in 2017, when the boiler equipment was ruined, that alone was a million dollars,” she said. “This time it’s all of that equipment plus all of the other restoration that needs to take place.”
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Ms. Andrus said that they do plan on making a few changes as they renovate the basement. One of which will be a designated Makerspace, equipped with a laser cutter, vinyl cutters and heat presses that people can come in and use and create things.
Another former office space in the basement is planned to be a nursing area or kid-calming space.
Where there once was a small toy and doll section will (hopefully) become an indoor playground.
“So we’re going to try to make it better than it was before it flooded so I think that will be good,” she said.
Many of the electrical and boiler systems in the mechanical rooms were badly damaged if not completely destroyed. It’s a noisy area. There’s always some sort of buzzing. And broken fire alarms have been going off for months, she said.
Besides all of the carpeting in the basement being ripped out, the brick foundation under the windows needs to be torn apart and re-laid according to a local mason.
Ms. Andrus sounded hopeful after City Council’s regular meeting on Monday approved funding to help aid in repairs since the dam failure and flooding last spring. These repairs include the installation of a new water heater, a fire suppression system, a steam boiler and an air ventilation unit.
Even though a previous phase of the renovation project has been approved which restored heat in the building, Ms. Andrus explained that like last summer, they still won’t have air conditioning this year either.
“That’s another reason we’re not open to patrons, besides the fact that the fire alarm system doesn’t work, we don’t have temperature control,” she said. “So to have patrons in here and have it be ninety degrees isn’t really an option.”
She said that the one air conditioning system that does work is in the auditorium, which doesn’t really help since there are no books in the auditorium.
Currently, there are a lot of donation boxes stacked up in the auditorium, as well as MCTV’s temporary stage set-up. [Note: though they are grateful to Midlanders for their generosity, she kindly asks that no more book donations be made at this time].
As far as the basement level, everything has since been moved upstairs. The main floor and upper mezzanine look like a very well-organized ant farm.
“When we first moved everything up here you couldn’t walk in this room (the main ground-level floor),” she said. “And we’ve had to move staff persons’ office areas up here to get them out of the way of contractors. And we’ve still got them as spread out as possible to maintain COVID regulations.”
Ms. Andrus said that they haven’t hired anybody since last year, and everybody has been furloughed at some point. Today, there are still some employees who are partially furloughed because they aren’t open on the weekends and they’re trying to be cautious and practice social distancing.
Her optimism is reassuring as she’s personally witnessed the progress they’ve made over the course of the last year.
“We’re starting to pull materials because we’re going to be doing pop-up libraries this Summer. So we’re going to be wheeling as many book carts as we can outside and let them browse and check out books,” she said.
Ms. Andrus said she can’t over-emphasize just how far they’ve come since everything that’s happened.
“I think that in people’s heads, they think that the Library looks the way that it did when they left,” she said. “And this is literally a hundred times better than what it looked like before. I mean, we had two isles just stacked on top of each other. It was over 80,000 materials that we had to sort and put in order. It took us four or five months just to organize the mess from pulling everything upstairs.”
She said they are allowed to take monetary donations.
“Obviously, FEMA doesn’t pay 100% of the costs, they pay 75%, so everything helps,” she said. “Our project is well over a million dollars.”
Another way residents can help is by going to the Grace A. Dow Library website and becoming a ‘Friend Of The Library.’ You can follow the group on Facebook at: facebook.com/fogadml