This last weekend, a seven-alarm warehouse fire in Brooklyn put many public records in danger. It’s now been determined that losses may not have been as bad as were initially feared. The following is from an article by Anemona Hartocollis, published in the February 5, 2015 edition of the New York Times website.
New York City has reassessed the extent of the damage to public records caused by a seven-alarm warehouse fire in Brooklyn over the weekend and expects it to be less than initially feared, city officials said Thursday.
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The latest inventory has found that records from two city agencies were stored at the CitiStorage warehouse in Williamsburg: 40,000 boxes from the Administration for Children’s Services, and 32,700 boxes from the health department, including 28,000 boxes of correctional health inmate records from 2009 and earlier. Both agencies are still assessing the damage to those records and the impact on their agencies, city officials said.
The city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation stored 700,000 boxes of records there, of which 143,000 boxes were damaged. The agency believes that the impact on patients will be minimal because public hospitals switched to electronic records many years ago, officials said.