You can see the jumble of boxes and books here from where they were tossed and spilled. You wouldn't know to look at it but I did have a sort of orginization to the boxes of books.

As you can see in the picture, the boxes that were closest to the ground were hit the worst. The water got up to the bottom of the fourth box, completly destroying the books that were contained in them. The books in the fourth boxes in the stacks were destroyed just because it took so long to be able to get there, they had soaked up water from the boxes below.

Then there were the ones on top that should have been fine but they fell over.

The closer to the bottom of the stacks we got in the cleaning the more saturated and slimy the books were. River water is probably one of the worst things for books. (Under statment of the year, I know.)

I and 3 volunteers worked for 3 days cleaning and sorting books. Near the end of the third day another person who was cleaning out their rental unit showed up with a backhoe. I solicited his machine, and him to drive it, to help with the clean up. He did in 20 minuets the equilivant of what I did in one day.

In three days we moved about 30,000 books into a dumpster and sorted most of the 20,000 that was left removing damaged ones.

Monday 7-17-2006 Going through and starting the inventory of what is left.

The warehouse looks a bit empty.

But as one of my subscribers mentioned, look at the room that I now have to work with. Not the way I want to do a cleaning, I perfer to be a bit more selective, but it was effective.

Of course this doesn't cover what was contained in the second unit. I had appropiated space from my father's rental unit to contain even more. But he had already gotten rid of many of the books that were there. And I can only guess what they were or how much they were worth.

So to conclude this little essay, its not over....

The water has receded and the clean up is, well, mostly done for many of the inhabitants. But the work has just begun. Now everyone is in holding patterns waiting for contractors, insurance companies, inspecters, and the government to get to them.

The insanity has not gone away, but a type of normaility has begun to creap back into our lives. As we see the ice cream truck starting to make its rounds again, and the streets slowly become clean again.