After a drinking fountain leaked into the Aurora History Museum's collection storage, museum employees worked to salvage the pieces exposed. (Video by Tom Hellauer)
Weeks after flooding spurred emergency conservation efforts at the Aurora History Museum, the restoration of damaged artifacts is still underway.
Museum leadership, meanwhile, is exploring the installation of systems that can alert staff if such an incident occurs again.
Maintenance staff discovered the flooding when they went to the museum on a different work order in late December.
Following an arctic freeze that fell across the area that week, the museum initially thought a pipe had burst. They weren't sure how many days the leak went undiscovered because the museum had been closed between the 24th and 27th of December. The facility closed until January 10 and repairs got underway.
“When you’re in a museum, it’s one of the worst things that can happen,” Museum Director T. Scott Williams said.
Staff later learned the culprit was a water fountain on the second floor, and believe the flooding began on the 27th. That’s the day environmental control sensors stopped collecting data. The devices meter the humidity and temperature levels inside the museum.
Located directly above a collections room storing scores of artifacts, water flowed through the floor to the main level, causing damage to walls and carpet in addition to collections.
Inside the collections rooms, Curator of Collections Lizz Ricci found hundreds of items – mostly textiles – everywhere from damp to drenched. Soaked hats. Hat boxes sitting in puddles.
“When we walked into the storage room it was like it was raining from the ceiling,” Ricci said.
Portions of the ceiling caved in. With the help of library staff and contractors, the museum rigged up a dehumidifier and fans as Ricci activated the museum’s emergency plan for floods.
“The water just disintegrated all the (ceiling) tiles and there was pulp everywhere,” she said.
In a separate room, staff laid out the artifacts to dry. They included shoes dating back to the 1800s, and uniforms from Buckley, Fitzsimons and Lowry military bases. Some items were donations the museum received back at its founding in 1979. Their individual history isn’t known because the donations’ backstories were not catalogued in the museum’s early days, Ricci and Williams said.
For the next three-and-a-half weeks Ricci’s main responsibility became inventorying each damaged item. None of the artifacts are a total loss, and most damage will require minor conservation and restoration, she and Williams said.
“A lot of stuff has dried out pretty well,” Ricci said.
The director did not provide the cost of facility repairs or conservation work, saying the city is still assessing.
The museum and city staff are researching installing a system that could alert museum staff when an incident like the leak has occurred, Williams said. He did not know how much the project would cost, he said, but the city is looking into the possibility of using insurance monies or general fund dollars.
“That way we can get on it even faster,” he said, if “heaven forbid” another flooding incident occurred.
“We were very lucky.”
