Two years after records were destroyed in a warehouse fire in Brooklyn, the Village of Manorhaven is still receiving requests for documents that were lost, while continuing to digitize archives in an effort to avoid another loss.
A seven-alarm fire ripped through a Brooklyn warehouse on Jan. 31, 2015, destroying records from a variety of municipalities, including New York City, as well as 90 boxes of Manorhaven records.
The village sent records off site to CitiStorage, which owned the building at 5 N. 11th Street.
A letter on Aug. 5, 2016, detailing the losses said 90 boxes were destroyed in the fire containing documents from the inception of the village in 1930 to around June 2013.
The documents included building department files, meeting transcripts, agendas, planning studies, employee records, grant applications, budgets, claim abstracts, village receipt books, flood maps, historical photographs and news articles.
“In other words, a fair sampling of everything that transpired at Village Hall,” Donald Badaczewski, the village court clerk, said.
The documents were not backed up.
Former village Clerk Leslie Gross said CitiStorage did not tell the village about the records being destroyed in the fire until around June 2015.
However, CitiStorage continued to bill the village during the months following the fire for $25 to $50 a month, according to former village Attorney James Toner.
The village began to investigate these small charges, Gross said, and she found out about the fire during her investigation.
“We didn’t known that they were there, and we were not contacted by them for several months after the fire,” said Gross, who was the clerk from 2014 to 2016. “They were still billing us for storage of the records.”
The storage company acknowledged in a letter to the village that the fees should not have been charged and offered credits.
Badaczewski said many people learn about the fire when they file a Freedom of Information Law request or inquire about a file.
However, the issue was listed on a Dec. 14, 2015, agenda for a work session of the Board of Trustees.
Gross said the village didn’t immediately alert residents about the fire because it was still trying to figure out what was lost.
She said before she left the village in the summer of 2016, the village began to digitize its records and documents.
Badaczewski said the new administration has begun creating digital copies of permanent records, including building department files, contracts and minutes, before they are sent to the off-site location.
The village uses the program Laserfiche, a management software that secures information for companies, municipalities and various organizations.
The village still uses the same storage company, now called Iron Mountain.
