Sandy Revisited

I dropped by the Studio yesterday afternoon to leave this month's rent check and see the state of the room.  Molly had acquired a large double set of flat files and they had been dropped off (disassembled) in there about a week ago, completely blocking access to my storage cabinet and my work table.  I called her to express my dissatisfaction with the state of the room, which she claimed to have not actually seen yet.  The flat files are a good thing, and I offered to meet up there soon and help her move furniture and get rid of junk so we could get it set up and get the room back to functioning.  Between the long running table project, the busy end of the semester and holidays, and then the never ending snowstorm that has been 2014, I haven't been able to get much art done lately (my Christmas card and train postcard were done at home), but I'd love to get back to work.  A few days later she called to say that she had moved the flat file parts enough to give me access to my stuff and she'd work on picking a day for us to do some heavy work.

So when I arrived yesterday and saw the current state of the room, I was actually happy.  Sure, these photos look like a disaster, but I could see that considerable stuff (hers) had been removed from the room.  The photo below shows a lot of empty floor and wall space that hasn't been that empty in years. Still a huge mess, but it looked like she had made a lot of progress since last week.  One odd thing- the lights had been left on inside the locked room, and when I was leaving I found out why- they couldn't be turned off.  The room has two switches, one by each door, and neither one had an effect on the lights in the room, though one was turning off the hallway light right outside the door we use most often.  So I locked up and went upstairs to ask about it.

As soon as Brendan saw me he assumed I was there to ask about the flood, which he assumed Molly had told me about. What?  It seems that there was a problem with one of the sewer lines on route 71 in Neptune, and several days ago it started backing up into the building, through these odd floor drains in the room.  Not a deep flood, but the stuff had spread over parts of the floor, under the door, and into the hallway.  The pipe problem had been resolved, and the building used all the workers they had access to to do a lot of cleaning to an extent that I didn't realize what had been there.  So a lot of the stuff that had been removed was not so much Molly sorting her piles of art and materials, as it was disposing of flood damaged items that had been piled up on the floor, under tables, under the press, leaning against walls, etc.  I know she had a massive pile of old prints and drawings under the press, stuff going back to grad school.

I certainly know what it's like to have a sewage flood destroy large amounts of old work.  I have well documented on this blog the effect of Hurricane Sandy on my own back work.  Back then, sewage flooded the basement I had a lot of my older work stored in, two feet deep, and though I had nothing on the floor, prints and blocks on lower shelves were completely ruined.  It's kind of surprising that this hadn't happened at the Studio before, since we had major hurricanes in the region in 2011 and 2012.  No problems anywhere in the building, much less those floor drains.  Still, as a precaution, each time I had made sure I had nothing of value on the floor, with all my blocks and prints on shelves built on top of the inconvenient but now fortuitous concrete platforms around the room, or on top of tall furniture, and they were still there right now.  So this disaster I lost nothing of mine, but I can relate to what Molly will be dealing with.  I'm hoping next week we can find a time to get back to the task of getting the room in order to get back to printmaking.

Aas for those lights, they were aware of the situation.  The person they had doing electric work had decided on a creative solution to rewiring some of the circuits in the basement.  I'm told someone will be coming in next week to try to sort it out.