Types of Disasters and Their Impact on Libraries and Archives

Libraries and archives are the memory banks of society. They hold rare manuscripts, government records, newspapers, photographs, and digital files that often exist nowhere else. Yet these collections sit constantly at risk. Every day, libraries somewhere lose materials to fire, flooding, high winds, power failures, or deliberate human action. Understanding the different types of disasters that threaten collections is the first step in disaster management, because you cannot protect a collection against a danger you have not clearly identified. This post breaks down the major categories of disasters, examines how each one damages library and archive materials, and looks at why prevention matters so much.

Understanding disaster categories
Fire hazards and damage control
Common causes of fire
The challenge of fire suppression
Water and flooding risks
Floods and external water
Plumbing failures and leaks
The threat of mould
Man-made threats: theft and vandalism
Theft and vandalism
War and armed conflict
Why classifying disasters matters

Understanding disaster categories

A disaster, in the context of preservation, is any sudden event that threatens the safety of people, collections, and facilities. The National Disaster Management Authority, the apex body for disaster management in the country, broadly classifies disasters as either natural or man-made. This same division applies directly to libraries and archives.

Natural disasters are caused by environmental and geological forces. These include floods, earthquakes, cyclones, lightning strikes, and fires triggered by natural phenomena. Man-made disasters arise from human action or negligence, such as electrical fires, plumbing failures, arson, theft, vandalism, and armed conflict. The distinction matters because the prevention strategy for each is different. You cannot stop an earthquake, but you can build to withstand it. You cannot prevent every flood, but you can avoid storing rare books in a basement.

Many disasters also overlap. A flood may trigger a power outage, which disables a fire alarm, which then allows a small electrical fault to grow into a major fire. This is why preservation experts treat disaster planning as a multi-hazard exercise rather than a response to single, isolated threats.

Fire hazards and damage control

Fire is widely regarded as the single most destructive threat to a collection. Unlike water damage, which often leaves materials wet but salvageable, fire can destroy paper completely and permanently in minutes. A library is essentially a building full of fuel. Paper, wooden shelving, cardboard boxes, and electrical equipment all burn readily, and once a fire takes hold among densely packed shelves, it spreads with frightening speed.

Common causes of fire

According to a UNESCO study on fire protection, the primary threat of fire in libraries and archives comes not from freak accidents but from fire safety rules being ignored. Older buildings adapted into libraries are especially vulnerable, because their structures may have deteriorated and their electrical wiring insulation may have broken down into a hazard.

The National Archives in the United States identifies the leading causes of fire in cultural institutions as heating devices, arson and suspected arson, faulty electrical wiring and appliances, and smoking. Faulty wiring deserves special attention. As buildings age, the wiring behind outlets and switches wears out, and a single short circuit can ignite nearby paper. The National Archives Building itself experienced a small fire in 2003 that was traced to a short in an electrical wire.

Arson is a sobering reality. Historical studies of library fires have found that a large share were deliberately set. Poor housekeeping makes any fire worse: accumulated paper, dust in ventilation ducts, and combustible solvents stored near books all help a fire spread far faster than it otherwise would.

The challenge of fire suppression

Fire suppression creates a difficult paradox for librarians. The most common suppression method, water sprinklers, saves the building and stops the fire, but soaks the very collection it is meant to protect. When the 2003 National Archives fire triggered the sprinkler system, the flames were extinguished quickly, but around 100 boxes of records sustained water damage in the process.

This trade-off is why modern archives storing irreplaceable materials sometimes use alternative systems, such as gas-based or clean-agent suppression that smothers fire without water. However, these are expensive, and many libraries operate on tight budgets. The practical compromise for most institutions is a combination of smoke detection wired to a monitoring centre, readily available extinguishers, and strict housekeeping. As preservation guides repeatedly stress, prudent fire protection is often relatively inexpensive compared with the cost of losing a collection.

Water and flooding risks

If fire is the most feared disaster, water is the most common. Water damage can come from dramatic events like floods and cyclones, or from quiet, everyday failures like a leaking pipe or a blocked drain. Either way, the effect on paper, photographs, and bound volumes can be devastating.

Floods and external water

Flooding is a major hazard in many regions, and the NDMA has prepared flood hazard atlases for several flood-prone states including Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, and West Bengal. Libraries located in low-lying areas or near rivers face a recurring annual threat during the monsoon. The danger is not only the water itself but everything it carries. The catastrophic 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami offers a stark illustration: a provincial library in Aceh saw its entire ground-floor collection swept away, and the floor was left covered in thick mud. Floodwater is rarely clean. It deposits silt, sewage, and debris that contaminate materials and make salvage far harder.

Plumbing failures and leaks

Most water disasters are far less dramatic than a tsunami. A burst pipe, an overflowing gutter, a failed roof, or a leaking air-conditioning unit can quietly soak shelves over a weekend before anyone notices. In 2024, a university storage facility experienced a leak within its storage stacks that left books wet and required emergency drying in a conservation lab. These slow, hidden leaks are dangerous precisely because they go undetected.

The threat of mould

Water damage rarely ends when the water dries. Within 48 hours, wet paper in a warm, humid environment becomes an ideal breeding ground for mould. Mould stains and weakens paper, spreads to neighbouring volumes, and poses a serious health risk to staff. This is why preservation specialists like the Northeast Document Conservation Center emphasise rapid response: wet materials must be dried, frozen, or dehumidified quickly. The standard rescue method involves interleaving books with absorbent paper, pressing out excess water, and then drying pages in front of fans, while larger collections are often frozen to halt mould growth until they can be processed.

Man-made threats: theft and vandalism

Not every disaster is accidental. Some of the gravest losses to cultural heritage come from deliberate human action, ranging from petty theft to the systematic destruction of collections during war.

Theft and vandalism

Theft is a persistent, low-profile threat. Rare maps, plates from illustrated books, and valuable manuscripts are targeted because they fetch high prices on the collectors’ market. Often the loss is not noticed for years, since a missing page from a bound volume leaves no empty shelf. The Library of Congress includes guidance on responding to theft of collections within its emergency management resources, treating it as a genuine disaster category alongside fire and flood. Vandalism, meanwhile, is destruction for its own sake, and the insurance industry has historically named vandalism as a leading motivation behind arson fires, linking these two man-made threats directly.

War and armed conflict

The most extreme form of man-made disaster is armed conflict. During war, libraries and archives are damaged both as collateral and, increasingly, as deliberate targets. Destroying a community’s archives is a way of erasing its identity and history. UNESCO notes that the destruction of cultural heritage in recent years has been the most significant since the Second World War, and that cultural property is no longer merely caught in the crossfire but is sometimes deliberately attacked.

Recent conflicts make this painfully concrete. UNESCO has verified damage to hundreds of cultural sites in Ukraine since 2022, including libraries and an archive among museums and monuments. A network of librarians and archivists has worked to document the damage and looting of archives, libraries, and museums in Gaza. These losses are permanent. Unlike a building, which can be rebuilt, a destroyed manuscript or a looted archive can never be recovered.

In response to such destruction, the international community adopted the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. It was the first international treaty dedicated to safeguarding cultural heritage during war, and it introduced the Blue Shield emblem to mark protected sites such as libraries and archives. The intentional destruction of historical and cultural property is now recognised as a war crime.

Why classifying disasters matters

Studying these categories is not an academic exercise. Each type of disaster demands a different preparedness strategy. Fire calls for detection systems, electrical audits, and good housekeeping. Water calls for sensible storage choices, leak detection, and rapid drying capacity. Theft calls for access controls and inventory checks. Conflict calls for digitisation, off-site backups, and legal protection. A library that has identified its specific risks, whether seasonal floods, an ageing wiring system, or a valuable rare-book collection, can direct its limited resources where they matter most. As preservation guides consistently note, action taken after a careful facility survey often prevents a disaster from ever occurring.

What do you think? Which type of disaster do you believe poses the greatest threat to libraries in your own region, and why? If a library could afford to protect against only one category of disaster, which should it prioritise?

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References

PDF 📄

Table of Contents

Understanding disaster categories 🔗

Fire hazards and damage control 🔗

Common causes of fire 🔗

The challenge of fire suppression 🔗

Water and flooding risks 🔗

Floods and external water 🔗

Plumbing failures and leaks 🔗

The threat of mould 🔗

Man-made threats: theft and vandalism 🔗

Theft and vandalism 🔗

War and armed conflict 🔗

Why classifying disasters matters 🔗