[Nhcoll-l] Update on Torrey Hall and the Pringle Herbarium after the August 3 fire

[Dorothy Allard]

Hello everyone

It has been nine days since the fire in Torrey Hall that affected the Pringle Herbarium and the mammal and arthropod collections that together comprise our natural history museum.

The first three days (Friday-Sunday) were occupied by removing water-damaged materials, including some accessioned lichens and some unaccessioned vascular plant specimens, preparing them for freezing, and freezing them. We got good advice and help from our library Special Collections staff, who gave us two Disaster Kits that they had prepared in case something like this affected their collections, but which were very useful for us as well. Through the internet, we also learned about Harvard Herbarium's experience with a water damage episode.

In those three days, numerous volunteers came together to move stuff and do the freezing prep. We threw out some wet stuff that was too far gone to save, or that was identified as second priority. It was a complicated and chaotic scene, since there were two different construction crews on site (one that was working on an adjacent building), the water damage specialists, university physical plant people, the biologists, and the volunteers.

Also, by the end of the weekend, the water damage specialists had cleaned out all of the wet ceiling tile and placed huge ventilation tubes throughout the building to dry it out.  A lot of hard work by a lot of people made this happen quickly.

It took from Monday to Friday to move the herbarium cabinets out of Torrey and across campus to Jeffords Hall, the Plant Biology and Plant and Soil Sciences building. Dave Barrington and our Physical Plant people orchestrated the move, with a lot of help from Hilda White and Eunice Froeliger, volunteers who work in the herbarium. Hilda and Eunice had the difficult job of figuring out the placement of 200 or so cabinets on two different floors and in several different rooms in Jeffords, mainly in the basement, in a way that the cabinets could still be accessed and be distributed in roughly the right order. They made it happen. We hired two giant cranes, one at Torrey to remove the cabinets through a hole in the roof or out windows and place them on a moving truck, one to take the cabinets off the trucks and put them into Jeffords. They were removed with their contents inside, since the specimens were mainly unaffected by the fire or water. Some of the cabinets had to be tipped on their side in order to go on the elevator in Jeffords, and we found that if tipped only on their left side (the fold side of the genus folders), the specimens remained intact. Specimens in packets had to be boxed before the cabinets were moved.

The frozen materials that we saved are being shipped to a special facility in Massachusetts for freeze-drying. All of the rest of the contents of Torrey has been, or is being, removed, cleaned, and stored in Jeffords.  We are now setting up temporary operating space for the herbarium and the digitization lab there. There are mountains of boxes to go through and reorganize. The interior of Torrey will be gutted and completely renovated; the exterior was in the process of restoration at the time of the fire and that will continue. The whole thing is expected to take 18-24 months.

I thought that you all would appreciate an update.


Dorothy J. Allard
Pringle Herbarium
Plant Biology
University of Vermont
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