Archie Re-Opens After Flooding

After nearly 2 weeks of hard work cleaning up flood damage, the Archie branch has re-opened! In the early morning hours of July 27th, the Kansas City area experienced heavy rains. South Cass County received over 7 inches in just 4 hours, causing many areas to flood, including parts of Archie, MO. The Police Station, City Hall, and Library, all located on south Main Street, had between 4 and 30 inches of water inside. The library had about 6 inches of water inside, and had books, computer equipment, and furniture damaged by the water.

Fox 4 KC covered the initial damage here.

 

Many volunteers from the community came to help us clean up as soon as the water receded. Without the help of patrons, the community, local businesses, and donations, we would not have been able to re-open so quickly. We are truly grateful for the support from our community. We would like to extend a very special thanks to the Sutton and Patton families, who both worked with us to get the water out of the branch as quickly as possible. Thank you to Pioneer Supply for lending us fans to help dry out the carpet. Thank you to everyone who donated to help us bear the costs of repairs: the Cass County Public Library Foundation, the Archie Fall Festival Committee, Archie 2000, and everyone locally or across the country who donated to the GoFundMe campaign.

We are still working to replace furniture that was damaged. We are currently using carts to store some of our collection until we can get a new shelving section to replace the one that was damaged. The carpet is dry and disinfected; we were even able to save the children’s rug.

 

The generosity of Archie has not stopped there. The Archie Fall Festival Committee is hosting Bingo at the Fishing Dock on August 30th, and they have graciously offered to donate the proceeds from the event. We are amazed at the outpouring of generosity in the community. Also on August 30th, the Archie branch will be hosting an open house and community appreciation day. It starts at 11am, after Storytime, and concludes with the end of summer party (that was scheduled for the day Archie flooded) at 4pm. For more information on the open house, click here.

If you would still like to help, you can donate to the cause. Thanks to patron suggestions, we also have 4 wish lists on Amazon of all of the items we lost in the flood. Our Large Print and Western collections were hardest hit, but we lost titles from all of our collections.

Picture Books & Board Books:  http://a.co/jboUNV7
Large Print titles: Link: http://a.co/9GTXS9T
Teen & Children’s titles: http://a.co/5RIy88C
Adult Fiction titles: http://a.co/9N1OdcB

Thank you for supporting us through the repairs, and we hope to see you at the library again soon. We are open and ready to serve you.