The impact of a Thursday night water leak that damaged Luzerne County government records won’t be clear for several days or weeks, a county official said Friday.
David Parsnik, administrative services division head, said a company specializing in emergency record recovery was called in to move the records to another location, dry them out and inventory them.
“They will tell us which ones are salvageable and destroyed,” Parsnik said, stressing the company will be paid by insurance — not the county’s general fund operating budget.
He estimated at least one tractor-trailer would be filled with water-logged records that must be removed.
Building owner Thomas C. Thomas identified a faulty sprinkler head as the cause of the leak at his warehouse on Union Street in Wilkes-Barre.
Water rained onto records kept on three floors leased by the county for an unknown length of time until county District Attorney’s Office workers discovered the problem.
Thomas said the building’s fire sprinkler system was well-maintained and inspected quarterly.
The county has been in the process of moving records out of the leased property into a new county-owned storage facility in Hanover Township. That move, which began in July, was prompted by a state archive expert’s warnings years ago that the Thomas facility was insufficient for record storage due to temperature extremes, lack of security, leaks and fire hazards.
Parsnik said the water damage would have been more extensive if the move had not been underway because water touched areas that previously contained records, particularly on the third floor.
The remaining records not soaked at the Wilkes-Barre property will be moved into the Hanover Township site next week, he said.
“In light of what happened, we are going to accelerate our moving plan,” he said.
In addition to the District Attorney’s Office, representatives of court administration and mapping visited the building Friday to review the damage, he said.
The county pays $103,104 annually to rent storage space at the property.
