After several days of heavy rain in March, 2003, the roof of the Payette Public Library started leaking.  Unfortunately, the leak went undetected for some time because it started in a corner of the roof and ran down inside a wall into the basement.

 Another unfortunate fact was that the basement is where the library stores its permanent Northwest Collection books, some of which are very difficult to replace.  The only fortunate thing that happened was that an employee who was working on Saturday happened to check on a light left on downstairs before leaving for the weekend and heard water running in the back room.  Otherwise, the damage would have been much worse than the 58 books that were affected.

 We were able to repair or restore most of the damaged books and replace many of those that were not salvageable.  All of the damaged books were covered by our insurance policy.