Intense rain in Auckland destroys part of my collection....

overscan (PaulMM)

overscan (PaulMM)

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So we just had some serious rain here in Auckland. Flooding in lots of places, the water out the front of my house looked like a river. House is fine but the shed where some of my overflow aviation collection was stored is.. not.

Most of the good stuff is scanned, but my Air International collection wasn't, and half of it is now a soggy mass of paper at the bottom of a box full of water.

House is covered in drying out photos drawings and brochures.
 

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Oh crap. Feel sorry for you. Hope the digital collections are safe at least. Did your computers / HDs / USB drives / whatever took a bath too ?
 
 
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I lost every single film photo I ever took, apart from the very few I scanned and a handful I'd set aside, to a leak in the shop roof. All the photos got welded into a solid block of chemical-rich cellulose. I wouldn't have thought that the film negatives would dissolve in rain water, but here we are. So I feel yer pain.
 
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overscan (PaulMM) said:
So we just had some serious rain here in Auckland. Flooding in lots of places, the water out the front of my house looked like a river. House is fine but the shed where some of my overflow aviation collection was stored is.. not.

Most of the good stuff is scanned, but my Air International collection wasn't, and half of it is now a soggy mass of paper at the bottom of a box full of water.

House is covered in drying out photos drawings and brochures.
Click to expand...
it kind reminds me of what happened in Lisbon a few weeks ago, really sad, i hope you are ok.
 
overscan (PaulMM) said:
So we just had some serious rain here in Auckland. Flooding in lots of places, the water out the front of my house looked like a river. House is fine but the shed where some of my overflow aviation collection was stored is.. not.

Most of the good stuff is scanned, but my Air International collection wasn't, and half of it is now a soggy mass of paper at the bottom of a box full of water.

House is covered in drying out photos drawings and brochures.
Click to expand...
Sorry to hear this Overscan, that just sucks out loud. I lost pretty much everything I had collected up to 1990 due to a burst pipe and resulting flood. It was heartbreaking in that some of the things I lost were truly irreplaceable, such as a letter I received from Wernher von Braun (or his admin) when I was nine years old.

Hope you’re able to recover some things.
 
That's the kind of thing we all fear with books, magazines and data. I hope you go through without a total loss.
 
So I saw the news of this rainstorm on twitter and the news over the last day and thought of you Paul, remembering your pics from Christmas. Glad to hear you're all mostly ok and that, hopefully, that's the last of it for a while.

The imagery coming out of NZ has been incredible and the cleanup is going to be a drag. Hopefully your new PM will handle it better than some others I could mention. New PM's getting a new to the job workout seems to be a tradition over there.
 
TomcatViP said:
That's the kind of thing we all fear with books, magazines and data.
Click to expand...
Sad news Paul. I’m sorry for the loss.

TomcatVIP makes me thinking about the final fate about our precious collections. A source of joy in our lives. But let’s face it: the final fate for all of it, specially the digital items, will be extinction. Little will survive us.
So parcial catastrophic loss is just an anticipation of it. Sad but true.

The good about it: the forum is a place for knowledge exchange and preservation of information. Spreading knowledge makes it more survivable.
 
I've revisited the soggy mess and it appears the pre-1990 Air Internationals are made of a different paper stock and seem to come out pretty okay with some rippling of the pages. The 2000s era Air Internationals by contrast have turned to mush. There's a metaphor there.

Only big loss was the Sadleir P-25T brochure I've had since 2008 and totally forgot about scanning.
 
Sorry to hear about the flooding Paul. Glad the house and family are ok. I don't have an AI that I could scan or send, sorry.
 
I used to have a huge set of AI as well as other magazines but decided to give them away a few years ago.
 
Air International is meaningful mostly because it I subscribed to it when I was about 12 for my birthday and then used to wait with bated breath each month for the postman to deliver each month. There was a bookshop in London which had bound volumes for sale of earlier years which I bought quite a few of.

I got rid of my original issues later, but later bought a full run on Ebay before leaving England.
 
If you have any problems with the pre 2000 issues let me know as I have quite a few of them that I acquired whilst at Aerospace Publishing!
 
I have a ton of AI going back to the early seventies. I don't have all of them, but hopefully, between everyone here, we can find anything you're looking for. Sorry to hear about the loss and what's happening to NZ right now. Stay safe.
 
Sending you much sympathy.
The collections that many of us here have built up in what was a golden age for such things as books, magazines, toys and models are all too transient.
My father built up a similar collection of things ranging from a big Meccano set to Victorian shaving mugs in which I have no or little interest. I keep them in his memory.
Sadly each generation has its own collections. Most are dispersed or even destroyed by relatives or in the case of thise of us without families the arbitary acts of strangers.
As a compulsive hoarder I often think wistfully of leading a clutter free life with minialist furniture and so on. Then I remember that the Grim Reaper will ensure that I cannot take it with me. So enjoy while you can.
 
I had a hose to my toilet break when I was asleep and it also ruined books back in 2019.

That damn water always seems to know right where to go. So help me…I all but think some supernatural so-and-so doesn’t like us flying around up there…and goes out of its way to ruin our hopes and dreams.

If a book burns…it’s gone…but that stuck together stuff? It just sits there and mocks you. Maybe I can turn one page …rrrip.

Awful. Water is far worse that fire…it gets your hopes up that maybe…
 
Do you have a local service that does document freeze-drying ?
IIRC, that's what was done when big London library had a 'plumbing incident' that submerged a sub-basement...

Entire sodden boxes of papers get frozen hard then, still frozen, put under vacuum. Water sublimates, vapor is pumped away. Without surface tension to stick pages together, most was recovered in 'accessible' condition.
FWIW, I've done DIY version with a lab note-book that 'drowned' in sink...
--
I sorta cry when I hear of such an archive / reference lost.
I'm reminded how the Byzantines lost the recipe(s) for 'Greek Fire' during one of their periodic purges. Seems the Techs were so sworn to secrecy, the purge offered an easier death than ghastly consequences of admitting they 'knew stuff'.

And US losing viable recipe for 'FOGBANK', the aerogel fill/spacer in nukes. IIRC, after mega-millions spent on research, seems the 'WTF' was those old reagents were significantly less pure than modern 'Analar', and something now-lost had catalysed the gel.
Bit like original poly-ethylene needed a whiff of oxygen as its catenation catalyst...
 

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