AIC's 44th Annual Meeting

In the spring of 2013, flooding occurred in southern Alberta which submerged the storage facility of the Museum of the Highwood in High River. Due to the extent of the damage to the town, it was10 days before any salvage or recovery could happen. Some initial recovery was done in July 2013, but the remainder of the collection was frozen in July and thawed from Jan – June 2014. When faced with the conservation of over 500 textile items that had been submerged in muddy water for that long; the traditional, conservative methods of textile conservation treatment needed to be modified in some ways. This paper will show some of the treatments that occurred during this recovery/treatment effort and how resilient the textiles were to some very aggressive treatments that were done in order to remove the fine river silt. Pieces that appeared to be completely ruined turned out to quite resilient to treatments that wouldn’t normally be considered - surprisingly very good results came out of some of these drastic treatments and many pieces were able to be salvaged. This paper will discuss some of the surprising successes that occurred and will highlight the way that DTPA was used to help sequester the dirt from the muddy textiles, as well as pre-soaking and spraying techniques that were done. In the fall of 2014 – secondary treatment was done on many of textiles salvaged initially and the paper will also discuss how more than one treatment is often needed to completely remove this type of dirt.