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     Sigh. Thank you all very much for your kind words of support and great
     good humor.  I knew I'd hear from you all, all during the day, and it
     was a real treat to come in the office, in between hauling wet folders
     of maps off the top of the map cases, and get cheered up from your
     messages!
 
     Maybe 1000 maps went downstairs to the lab to dry out. We continued to
     find and dry out another 1000 or so maps, using space on the floor and
     tables in the Map Division. Primarily maps damaged were from our
     backlog, piled on top of mapcases, but a few maps were from a stack of
     putaways that had been used on Saturday.
 
     Due to the terrific structural design of the map cases, nothing in the
     cases got wet, but there is water between cases apparently, and we
     hope most has been wicked out with paper towels and evaporation. The
     page staff removed the bottom drawers of several cases and peered
     around with flashlights, and found no sign of water inside the cases.
     Hallelujah!
 
     None of our rare materials in locked cases was damaged, and we have
     taken out the bottom two drawers of material in all these cases and
     left the cases open to air dry.
 
     We are trying not to think too much about the brown water leaching
     through the ceiling that dries into a flaky substance, and how much
     physical contact we have had with it...And we try not to worry about
     the integrity of the plaster ceiling under which we work every day,
     and through which the flood waters flowed. And we try not to think
     about how long we will have to live under plastic tarps, hanging off
     8' map cases!
 
     Alice Hudson
     Map Division, NYPL