Air Date: Week of May 11, 2012

Transcript

GELLERMAN: Usually at this point in the show there’s a feature we call “Earth Ear” - sounds of the natural world from around the world. Well, this week we didn’t have to go far.

[LOUD FAN AND MACHINE SOUNDS]

GELLERMAN: This is the noise blasting from giant fans and huge dehumidifiers. It’s the sound we’ve been enduring all this week, as we try to dry out the Living on Earth studios and offices. We had a flood - a hot water pipe burst over the weekend. One of the first on the soggy scene was producer Bobby Bascomb.

BASCOMB: Well, when I came in here there were a bunch of workers all over the office cleaning up the office. The carpets were soaking wet. There was so much water in the carpets that it actually went up and over your shoes. I think there were inches of water before that, but they were just sucking it up with vacuum cleaners.

GELLERMAN: Living on Earth is on the top floor of our building, so water cascaded down stairwells and walls. Our studios and 20 years of the show’s audio archives were particularly hard hit. Here’s Living on Earth’s technical director and mopper-in-chief, Jeff Turton.

TURTON: The archives are a mess. There were a lot of boxes that were on the floor so they were inundated with a couple inches of water. The studios? We survived okay, mostly because we have a sub floor and even tho it got wet under the subfloor and caused a bit of a mess the electronics and all the other stuff survived reasonably well but under the subfloor it was definitely a mess.

GELLERMAN: Well, we’re still soggy, but slowly drying out. To see some photos of our flood, sail on over to our web site LOE dot org.

 

Links

LOE's Flood Damage