A heating coil under the front entrance of the National Library of Canada's main building at 395 Wellington Street had frozen and burst in the 40-below weather. The RATs waded in to stem the tide. Since 1988, when the original disaster reaction plan was developed, hundreds of National Library and National Archives staff have received general disaster training, while a small, more highly trained group is always at the ready as the on-call team.
People care about their' collections.
That's what's most impressive. Material was registered very quickly with a bar-code scanner and separated into wet' and damp' groups. Wet books were immediately sent to the freezer. The damp items were sent for air-drying, and Bullock is confident that they, too, will survive. In addition to taking endangered material out of the flood area, the RATs' work included protecting the books left behind by covering them with plastic and ensuring that no water remained on the shelves and removing water from the floors by wet-vacuuming and mopping.