West Salem’s Hazel Brown Leicht Memorial Library will open again this week after a frozen heating coil led to a flood that soaked the floor, destroyed several thousand books and forced a closing.

“Everything might not be available, but there will be enough that we can open the doors again,” said Sharon Aldahl, the library’s director. “The books that were on hold are available and the computers are working.”

By necessity, the library will be operating under a makeshift schedule during the coming weeks. Although the facility had been closed since the weekend before Thanksgiving, library patrons might have faced the prospect of being without a library for the remainder of 2008.

“The county health department told us the carpeting will need to be replaced,” Aldahl said. “It’s going to take four to six weeks for that carpeting to come in, but we didn’t want to be closed that long.”

After meeting with the county library staff and the village (which owns the building), a temporary solution was arrived at. “We are going to move much of the adult collection into the community room,” Aldahl said. Other parts of the library, such as the children’s collection and the computers, were not affected and will not need to be moved.

The staff spent much of the Thanksgiving weekend moving books and shelving into the community room. “As far as pitching in and helping out, people have been wonderful,” Aldahl said. “My staff has been putting in lots of extra hours — even those who were off have volunteered to come in and help.”

The job of book moving was limited to staff members because it was critical to keep the books in order and because the tight spaces involved limited the number of workers able to access the spaces. Besides the efforts of her own staff, Aldahl had praise for the county and the village.

“The village employees have been great, helping us to move the shelving. They (the village) own the building and the furnishings. The county owns the books and employs the staff.. While they are two separate groups, the cooperation has been marvelous — it’s an example of two governmental units working together really well,” Aldahl said.

Both the books and the building are fully covered by insurance, but that doesn’t mean that there are not inconveniences ahead. “When the new carpeting comes in, we’ll have to close again for a few days. Then we’ll have to take the books off the shelves in the community room, move the shelves back into the library and then put the books back. It’s going to be a lot of book moving,” Aldahl said.

All that moving, of course, means that patrons won’t always find materials in familiar places. And, while the community room is being used as a kind of “satellite” library it will be unavailable for other uses.

The initial flood, which occurred sometime between closing time Friday, Nov. 21 and the opening of the library the next day, destroyed books, damaged shelving and soaked the carpet. In hopes to dry and salvage the carpeting, industrial fans were brought in and run around the clock for several days.

“It was a high-quality carpeting with a good moisture barrier, so we had hoped we could save it,” Aldahl said.

However, moisture continuously seeping up from the concrete below eventually led the health department to make the call that the carpeting had to be replaced.

The situation will call for patience on everyone’s part. In addition to books not being in their usual places, others have been destroyed. And elbow room will be in short supply in the community room after all the shelving is moved in. “There won’t be a lot of free space there,” Aldahl said.

The worst damage occurred over the end of the adult fiction section. “We lost most of the adult fiction between P and Z,” Aldahl said.