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Disasters!

General list of destroyed libraries on Wikipedia!

Shipwreck!

There are some 3 million shipwrecks scattered across the ocean floor, UNESCO has estimated, and most of them are still waiting to be found. One of those ships, which sank off the French coast in 1843, carried a treasure trove of science — most of the papers and research equipment of Jeanne Villepreux-Power, who was one of the leading cephalopod researchers of her time.

Earthquake!

L'Aquila earthquake, Italy

A major casualty of the last week’s earthquake in Italy could be valuable research work done by a UK-based charity over the last two years.

Leukaemia Busters, Southampton, has been developing pioneering drugs in a clinic in the quake-hit city of L'Aquila.

Dr David Flavell, from the charity, said it was likely specially engineered leukaemia cells used to produce anti-bodies had been lost.

Two years of life-saving research into the treatment of a killer disease feared lost forever by a Hampshire charity has incredibly survived the Italian earthquake disaster.

Leukaemia Busters were delighted to discover that laboratories where scientists had spent the past two-and-a-half years working to develop pioneering drugs to fight leukaemia remain standing.

The unbelievable news came after rescue workers allowed Professor Rodolfo Ippoliti into the devastated city of L’Aquila and see for himself the destruction caused by the 6.3 magnitude quake.

Tohoku earthquake, Japan 2011

We have heard that research facilities and equipment at many universities and research institutions in the Tohoku and Kanto regions were damaged as a result of this disaster, and many scientists and students have been forced to stop their research because their valuable research samples or data have been lost. All of the staff and the researchers at NIH are deeply distressed by the devastation that has struck Japan.

Fire!

Southampton University Mountbatten building U. of York Chemistry - 1980 U. of York History - 1992 U. of York, fire in student room - 1993 University of Glasgow

Professor Sir Graeme Davies said that a substantial amount of research had been lost in the fire.

U. of York chemistry building Strathclyde university engineering department
  • Further disruption for Strathclyde teaching students 12 September 2012 (The Journal)
    bq. The disruption began on 7 February when 150 students had to be evacuated as a fire started in the Roche Lab in the university's chemical engineering department, forcing the university to relocate lectures across the campus including the Royal College, and Students' Association building on John Street.

U. of Nottingham - GlaxoSmithKline Carbon Neutral Laboratory for Sustainable Chemistry

The state-of-the art building, which had been partly funded by a £12m grant from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), was still under construction and due to be completed by next year. It was to be "the world's first carbon neutral lab", the university said, and would have housed work aimed at "fundamentally changing how we do chemistry in a more sustainable way".

Hurricane

Hurricane Katrina Hurricane Sandy

When Hurricane Sandy struck New York, it washed away years of scientific research from the New York University School of Medicine, including genetically modified mice, enzymes, antibodies and DNA strands.

Flooding and blackouts caused by super storm Sandy have had a devastating impact on scores of scientists in the Big Apple, with one research center losing thousands of lab mice as well as precious reagents—a situation that could set some researchers back years.

Although New York University (NYU) was clearly the research facility hardest hit by this week’s storm, others were also affected. Leslie Vosshall, who studies the olfactory system of mosquitoes at Rockefeller University, located about 35 blocks further up river from NYU, shut down a computer server in the basement on Sunday, but fears it could have been damaged from flooding. She has had to wait for the university to pump out the water, before she can check on it. “We do have some of the data backed up elsewhere, but it would set us back significantly.”

Sandy and Allison...

In 2001, a tropical storm called Allison flooded Houston with several feet of rain and pushed 10 million gallons of water into the medical-school basements at the University of Texas. The disaster drowned at least 4,000 rats and mice, along with 78 monkeys, 35 dogs, and 300 rabbits. (More than half the animals on campus had been living underground.) Nearby, at the Baylor College of Medicine, basement flooding killed 30,000 mice.

Tropical storm Allison

Soaked hard drives and drowned lab animals may delay new medical discoveries by months or years, but hope survives as research facilities dry out.

Tropical Storm Allison's flood caused the following losses at Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas-Houston Medical School:
One calf
Thirty-five dogs
Seventy-eight monkeys
Several hundred rabbits
More than 30,000 transgenic mice and rats
A state-of-the-art MRI machine worth $2 million
Ten years' worth of data on spinal cord injuries
A 20-year collection of 60,000 breast tumor samples

As well as destroying research animals, the floodwater has swamped computers. It has also caused power failures, knocking out the refrigerators and freezers used to store samples for research. Back-up cell cultures used for research into cancer at the Baylor College of Medicine will have died, say local officials.

Flood

HONOLULU — Heavy rain sent water as much as 8 feet deep rushing through the University of Hawaii's main research library Saturday, destroying irreplaceable documents and books, toppling doors and walls and forcing a few students to break a window to escape.

Lyttle's genetic research on the Drosophila goes back 35 years and some of it is irretrievably lost, he said.

McBride and much of the library staff worked all day Sunday to try to save some of the 90,000 photographs stored in the basement along with rare government documents and Hawaiian maps.

The flood also destroyed computers, books, magazines and equipment.

  • Classes canceled at UH on Wednesday 2 November 2004 (kpua.net)
    bq. ...But researchers at the University of Hawaii, which was hard hit, say the flash flood caused untold losses of research damage in computers damaged by flood waters.
  • Also risk during research for physical data... Cereal research programs set back a season from summer flooding 12 August 2014 (Manitoba Co-Operator)
    bq. ...All three programs have been set back a season due to data lost after their plots were inundated by the rising Assiniboine at July’s beginning ... they are starting to talk about what to do to mitigate the risk of this happening again...