This spring, I attended a workshop called "Burn Baby Burn", which was
offered by the Washington Conservation Guild, in conjunction with the
Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology. We
had the opportunity to set up a storage area at NIST, watch a fire set in
that room, and then do triage after the fire was put out. A storage room was
built for us, which was then filled with all kinds of "stuff", from flea
markets and garage sales. Because most of the participants were conservators
who work on disaster mitigation, a number of experiments were done to look
at different types of storage (boxes, bags, types of materials stored
depending on the conservators interested, etc.). We were all divided into
teams that dealt with specific types of media (paper, wooden objects,
ceramics and glass, metals, etc.) and were required to do triage on all
objects related to our assigned group.

With regards to the use of plastic corrugated boxes, there were two
extremely important findings that each group  came up with individually at
the end of the day.

1) Once the plastic box gets wet (ie. from the sprinkler system in your
storage area or from fire hoses), you must remove all items stored in it and
throw it away. Water gets into the corrugated spaces, and you can't dry it
out completely. We experimented with hair dryers, air drying, etc., but we
could not get these boxes totally dry (we also had a tendency to melt the
boxes with the hairdryer, trying to get into the corrugated areas!). This
was of great concern, especially to those of us on the paper triage team.

2) We also found that the plastics used in the corrugated boxes melted in
our fire more quickly and start to burn more quickly than the paper
cardboard boxes. This is important to note in that objects stored in plastic
corrugated materials suffered more severe damage from the melting plastic
than from smoke and water damage that occurred to the paper corrugated
boxes. Once the plastic melts and "sets" as it cools, the object is
virtually destroyed. With paper artifacts, you can usually just dry them out
if they have gotten wet.

I think in certain circumstances, plastic corrugated boxes are great. They
offer much better protection for artifacts than cardboard boxes, and are
excellent for storage areas where artifacts must be kept under water or
sewer pipes.

Melissa Heaver

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