Fire aftermath

Well, it’s Thursday, and I’m still working from home. The reoccupation of Zepler (the building I work in) has been put off until next week at the earliest – we’ve been told that there is no firm date. The salvage contractors are in Mountbatten, and staff based there have been told that they’ll be able to give directions to the contractors in order to retrieve up to one plastic crate of belongings each. Given the book collections of some of the professorial staff from IAM in Mountbatten, this is likely to be a difficult choice.

For up-to-date news, there’s a Wiki giving information for staff and students. I feel a certain perverse pride that, after freeriding on ECS for almost a decade in the form of server space and staff time (*cough*), Thee Temple ov thee Lemur is giving something back. Go !

has also done a sterling job with the temporary pages for ECS, which include a set of images that indicate the scale of the fire. The photographs taken from the top of the Zepler building show the extent of the damage to the Mountbatten building quite clearly; extensive fire damage to levels three and four, and some damage to level two. The current thoughts are that Mountbatten will probably end up being levelled and redeveloped, but there’s no timescale for this, obviously.

On the plus side, it looks like we’ll get our email and file store back today, which will make things a bit closer to business as usual.