DigMyPics.com (
About us )
Thursday May 8, 2008
To our customers and friends,
| On Monday May 5, 2008 at approximately 2am, Arizona Time, DigMyPics suffered
a devastating fire which destroyed our building and most of its contents.
The fire was large and the neighboring city of Mesa was called in to help fight
it. Three large ladder trucks were used to douse the flames.
Despite the best efforts of both cities' firefighters, the building was completely
destroyed. Our website, email, customer database, and telephone lines are all
currently down as a result. As you can imagine, Annette and I are heartbroken by what has happened. We
always believed that our customers placed their trust in us when they sent us
their photos and videos and we took that responsibility personally and extremely
seriously.
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Annette, the employees of DigMyPics, and I are all still in shock and disbelief
and we aren't sure if we'll even try to rebuild the company. What we are
sure of is that we want to help those people that had put their trust in us
to retrieve whatever is retrievable. We're putting together a restoration
team to help us restore whatever is uncovered. The Gilbert Fire Department
has been extremely helpful to us and are sensitive to what we had in the building.
They're working hard to help us find and extract our customer's photos and videos.
The scene is currently under their custody as they investigate the fire's cause
but today we delivered a trailer to them and they've agreed to put any photos,
film, hard drives or computers that they find in that trailer and give us access
to it twice a day. We'll take the material to another site we've temporarily
leased to begin work on salvaging any images or videos that can be saved.
I don't want to give any false hope, some people may have lost everything,
but we had some encouraging news today. The fire department was able to
successfully retrieve our servers and their forensic team has told us that the
servers look good and that the data is likely retrievable. We store a
copy of the images that have been completed on some of those servers.
The building is completely destroyed but the roof collapse may have sheltered
some areas from the worst effects. Fire crews are removing pieces of the
roof and have found some photos and reels in tact.
Scott Crossen
All of the local Phoenix stations carried the story.
Here is the story as
reported by
ABC15.com and here is the story on
Fox News 10.
Here are some photos and videos of the fire and recovery effort.
See some of the messages we've received from
our customers
Additional new information, as we get it, will be posted here.
NOTE: Because this page was getting pretty long, I created a page
for our postings from May 8 through May 19.
GFD = Gilbert Fire Department
Tuesday August 26 7:00 pm
We have added a new video reel on Page 21. Please take a look at that on
the video page.
http://www.digmypics.com/recovery/video/page21.html
Over the last 3 1/2 months we've worked hard to recover as many photos from the
ashes as possible. We've also tried to match up the photos with their
owners and we've been largely successful with that effort. Of the more
than 110,000 photos we've recovered, roughly 2000 photos remain that we have not
been able to match up.
The effort to recover and restore the photos has been challenging and some of
the photos we recovered were in very poor condition. Some photos required
extensive restoration requiring many hours of labor on just one single photo.
We've put together a page to allow customer to claim their photos from the ones
we have been unable to identify. We're simply waiting for a few more
customers to get back to us confirming the the photos we've matched to them
actually do belong to them. Once we've heard back we'll send out personal
emails to those that may have images in that group. If you're curious, you
can look now but you may need to review them again later.
Here is the link. You'll need your order number. http://www.digmypics.com/expo/Recovery/GetClaimOrderID.aspx
August 16 7:00 pm
The recovery work is coming to an end as we finish the last few thousand
restorations. We've now spent 3 1/2 months recovering over 110,000
photos and hours and hours of video. We still have a few thousand
unidentified photos and our team has been working 2 eight hour shifts to
complete the restoration work on those so we can match up the remaining
photos and videos with their owners. In the coming days we'll be sending
customers a link so they can view and claim the photos that belong to them.
ugust 15 4:00 pm
We've updated the video recovery page to use Flash instead of Silverlight.
Here is the link to the new page:
http://www.digmypics.com/recovery/video/page1.html
Tuesday August 1 7:00 pm
Watch the videos of the fire and look at the photos of the aftermath and you
wouldn't believe anything could have survived the fire. Last week
Annette and Julie did a tally of the number of images we've managed to
recover. You'd think if it was 10,000 or even 20,000 images it would
be a miracle. Well, through a lot of hard work and tenacity we
currently have more than 110,000 images and more than 30,000 feet of video
that we've recovered and we're still going.
Tuesday July 22 3:30 pm
Friday July 18 4:00 pm
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This week we brought in heavy equipment to
help us move the large sections of roofing aside and meticulously
comb through all of the ash and debris. It was a lot of work
and it was dirty work, but we did uncover a lot more than we
expected. We put together a short video to show you a little
of what happened at the scene.
You can watch the video by
clicking here. |
| Click to view video |
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Tuesday July 15 9:00 pm
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We've been working hard to give out as much information about our progress
and our efforts as possible. Last week Kyle produced a video that shows the
site and some our excavation efforts. You can watch the video by
clicking here. We were moving heavy pieces of roof aside, which is
why I was out of breath while talking, to try and excavate and uncover
any material possibly missed by the GFD (see the Saturday July 12 entry).
Tomorrow we have heavy equipment coming in to help us lift the pieces of
roof and put them aside so we can dig deeper. |
| Click to view video |
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Saturday July 12 7:45 pm
We're now two months into our restoration effort. Our progress has
been amazing, really. We're still uncovering memories for people that
we thought for sure had been lost. The week before the fire we got a
call from a potential customer in New York that wanted to steal his wife's
photo collection and get it digitized for their 10th anniversary. He
was extremely nervous about sending them and he called in and spoke to just
about everyone at the company. He told us if anything were to happen to
these photos, "I won't be having an 11th anniversary!". They arrived the
Friday before the fire. After the fire we were trying to locate his
negatives. We all felt so bad about it. We believed that most of
what he had sent was APS film cartridges but we haven't found a single APS
cartridge. Yesterday Stephan was scanning some 35mm negatives.
Everyday Annette goes through and looks at unidentified material to see if
she can recognize anyone. Well, these 600 or so negatives were his and
they were in great condition. We really thought it was all destroyed
because his 35mm negatives were in the same bin as his APS film. So
now we're all baffled, Where is the APS film? It's as if it all
evaporated.
As you know, during the fire the roof
collapsed and the GFD cleared it all out with heavy machinery and
put it behind the building in big piles (shown here on the right).
As they were clearing it out they had a team of people going through
it all looking for our customer's materials.
We weren't allowed to help them and they were being very thorough
but earlier this week I got 4 or 5 people together to go over to the
fire rubble and look around to see if the fire department missed
anything. Surprisingly, we found some stuff under the debris.
We found a few reels of 8mm film, a book of negatives, a bin with a
box of slides and a stack of prints. We were excited to find
all that, but most of it was stuff we had on our servers already but
some of it was stuff we didn't have. So now, of course, we're
wondering what else do these big piles hold. We worked for
several hours moving the sections of roof aside and sifting through
debris, but it's dangerous and I finally halted the work.
Later this week I arranged to bring in some heavy equipment to help
us move the debris so that we can go through it ourselves. Hopefully
we'll recover more of our customer's memories and solve the mystery
of the missing APS film cartridges, too. |
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Sunday July 6 11:08 pm
The support we're getting from customers still has us awestruck. We're
getting lots of email from customers wanting to know when we will start
accepting new orders. We're really anxious to get going again, too,
but we still haven't finished our recovery operation. Our dedicated
team has been working hard under less than ideal conditions to do the best
job possible. We still have photos to scan and the teams are working
diligently on digitally restoring the damaged photos. We're hoping we
can complete our recovery work in the next few weeks and then start taking
on new projects. Thanks for hanging in there with us!
Here's a conversation that went on between Annette and a customer this
weekend.
This is the kind of stuff that keeps us going.
Dear Scott and Annette,
Since the moment we heard about the tragic fire, we've been hoping and
praying that there might be something left in the rubble. We've been
checking the website daily, and have been keeping a close eye on your
incredible recovery effort. At this point, we're wondering if there are any
slides left to recover. Is there any chance that some of our slides are
going to be recovered? Or is it time to let go, and stop checking your
website every day....
Thanks for any feedback you can provide.
Lana and Bob
Hi
Lana and Bob,
We did scan a carousel this week which we have labeled Lana. We were hoping
to identify at least one more carousel before we emailed you. This doesn't
mean we do not have any other carousels that belong to you, it could be that
the technician that scanned that particular group did not recognize who they
belong to. I've attached two images from the group we did identify. These
have not gone through basic enhancement yet. We have almost completed all
of the slide scanning. Once we have the enhancement work complete we will
provide you with a link to view the images we were unable to identify.
Regards,
Annette Crossen
Oh my God, Annette....tears are pouring from my eyes as I write
this.....
The first picture is of my mother and father in law, in front of some 70's
paneling and artwork.
And the second picture...........is a picture of my wife, her two sisters,
and their mother on her sister's fifth birthday. It's priceless.....I am so
glad it's been salvaged. With a little Photoshop it should be good as
new....
Lana is traveling in Colorado with her parents right now, and I just phoned
them with the good news. Everybody was crying and laughing and carrying
on....I can't begin to tell you what this means to our family. There are no
copies of the pictures...
God bless you and Scott and the Gilbert Fire Department for carrying on with
the salvage effort...
Sincerely,
Bob
Wednesday July 2, 11:00 pm
We found a new home and it's awesome! We rented the 4th floor
of One MacDonald Center in the heart of downtown Mesa. The building
is a city landmark and just 2 years ago it was completely gutted and
underwent an $8 million renovation as part of the city of Mesa's revitalization
project. Mesa's new $100 Million art center is right across the
street. We're all very excited about our new location and can't wait
to get settled in. We're so jam-packed in the current space we
have.
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| We weren't even going to look at this building because
we didn't think it would work out to be off the ground floor but due
to a miscommunication between Annette and the broker he ended up scheduling
a visit there for us with the owner. We decided to go ahead and
check it out. Not only did we love the space but the owner turns
out to be a very nice guy. |
This fire has caused us to wonder what we could have done differently and
what we will do differently from now on but it's also sparked a philosophical
debate about risk. You can't eliminate risk, you can only displace it
and try to make decisions that minimize it. We certainly didn't expect
what happened to us and thought we had considered and prepared for the various
types of risks we might encounter. We worried most about mixing up photos,
burglary and bursting pipes and we took extraordinary measures against those
risks. Fire seemed unlikely and such a devastating fire seemed impossible.
We didn't have any of the common risks factors for fire, like flammable liquids,
high heat usage or flames.
Our fire happened none the less and it's been determined to have been an electrical
fire. It's widely believed by the fire investigators we've spoken with
to have been caused by the malfunction and subsequent explosion of a battery.
Turns out, these types of fires aren't that uncommon. Annette and I started
to notice a lot of reports on the news about fires. It led us to wonder,
are there suddenly more fires everywhere or do we just have a heightened awareness?
We asked around and learned that in the city of Gilbert, a very small community,
there are an average of 12 fires a week. In the Metro-Phoenix area; 57
fires a week! We're making changes not only to our business processes, but around
our home, too. We're taking a whole new look at risk. We live in
complex world and there are any number of everyday items surrounding us that
normally enhance our lives but that can also suddenly malfunction and turn our
world upside down.
Thursday June 26, 7:40 pm
We continue to make slow but steady progress despite all the obstacles.
We've been spending a lot of time this week trying to get our contact sheets
to print. We bought one of Dell's top of the line laser printers to help
us get the contact sheet books printed for those orders we've recovered.
The Dell printer's nice, but we quickly learned that it was woefully inadequate
for our demands and we haven't been able to get a single book printed the way
we want. Kristen and I spent time this week working with Konica Minolta
to order a production printer to replace the one lost to the fire. We
constantly complained about that Konica printer we had but it was able to handle
the work load. The one we lost was two years old and this newest generation
looks a lot better. We took a sample 9000 images there this morning and it printed
out a 30 image per page book with all 9000 images in about 3 or 4 minutes.
We were drooling over the option it offers to perfect bind and put a cover on
the book before it even exits the printer. The book comes out looking
like a paperback book you'd find at the bookstore.
On Tuesday I wrote about how I hoped the three places that said they had stock
of the Nikon scanners weren't all using the same warehouse. Well, apparently
they were because only one store was able to deliver the two they all said they
had in stock and the other two sent me an email telling me they were now backordered.
Apparently we've managed to buy every last Nikon scanner in the country.
Read the paper or watch the news and you'll see stories about how bad the economy
is and how the stock market keeps falling. Go out and try to lease an
office, though, and you'll find out there isn't any space available. We're
looking for 10-15,000 sq ft to replace the 17,000 sq ft we had. We found
a place about a mile from our old building and we were negotiating a 1 year
lease with the building owner. The current tenant was moving out this
week. We thought it was a done deal when all of the sudden the landlord
sent Annette an email saying he had gotten a 5 year lease deal from another
party. We had looked at another place that was new but had been sitting
empty waiting for a tenant for the past 12 months. In fact, we found out
the owner was a customer of ours. It met our needs but it was a longer
drive for most of the employees. Annette called the owner this morning
to see if it was still available. They just signed a lease on it yesterday!
If this is what it's like to find an office during a down turn, I'd hate to
be looking for space during boom times.
Tuesday June 24, 7:32 pm
We've shipped out over 30 orders so far. They've been mostly orders that were
saved on our servers or that we've recovered from some of the hard drives I
pulled from the ashes. We've been dealing with a number of challenges
that make the simplest things way too difficult and choke our productivity.
Getting Nikon scanners, for instance, has been frustrating. They're out of stock
almost everywhere so right now we only have about 6. I did manage to find 3
online places this weekend that finally had some in stock so I placed three
different orders, emptying out their stocks. Only one store has said they've
shipped any so I hope they weren't all using the same warehouse to provide their
product. It's hard to get any significant amount of work done with so little
equipment. We had a customer offer to sell us her Nikon 5000 scanner. We took
her up on it. Thanks Linda.
Restarting...
Annette and I waffled back and forth over whether to try and restart DigMyPics.
We ultimately decided to give it another shot. That decision is helping
us with the recovery because it gave us the impetus to order more desperately
needed equipment. I called my friends at Dell last week and asked them
how long it would take to get 28 of their newest super fast computers.
Yesterday morning a full sized tractor trailer showed up in front of our house
and delivered 5 palettes stacked full of new computers and monitors. Not
a chance we're parking in our garage for a while. We installed 9 of them
at the temporary office yesterday and this morning. The others are going
to have to wait until we have more space. Annette's got a couple
of brokers working to find us something. Hopefully we'll get that done
quickly. We've been using plastic tables and folding chairs, which are
not comfortable, but we got 24 office chairs delivered today.
I've never seen so much excitement over office chairs before.
Thursday June 19, 9:38 pm
We've got a few more videos added to the video recovery site (
http://www.digmypicsexpo.com/VideoRecovery.aspx ) and we've
removed the ones which we've been able to identify. We learned that Microsoft
Silverlight doesn't buffer the video very well so if there isn't enough speed
in your connection the video will stop and show a black screen for a few seconds
until it gets enough video buffered again. If you just wait a few seconds it
will pick up where it left off. There is a video position indicator under
the control buttons so you can see if you're at the beginning, end or somewhere
still in the middle. You may have to scroll down in your browser to see
it.
Amazingly, we've been able to recover data off some of the hard drives in the
video department. Most of the computers were melted beyond recognition
but the computers in the video department seemed to do better and we've had
some luck recovering data from some of those drives. We were excited to
find a few drives that were completely unharmed only to be disappointed to learn
that all of the video on them were from jobs we'd already shipped back to customers
before the fire. We did, however, recover some video data on other drives
that weren't in such good shape which belongs to few customers for which we
thought we had lost everything. We'll get those videos posted for your
review as soon as we can sort through them.
Tuesday June 17, 6:23 pm
We've started shipping! Kristin's been creating disks and sending them
to customers. Right now we're just sending people their digital photos
on disk. We're waiting for equipment to arrive to print the contact sheet
booklets. We ordered a special device used to kill mold and other
biological agents and we will treat all the photos with this machine but we're
not recommending that most people take their photos back unless there's a very
rare family heirloom you really want. Annette's been sending emails to
the customers we've shipped.
We're looking for the owner of these photos:
Thursday June 12, 11:12 pm (updated on Friday June 12, 7:43 pm)
We're finally getting some of the infrastructure to function and we were able
to get our automated CD/DVD burning systems to create the CDs for a job late
this afternoon. We should be able to crank out some CDs and DVDs and ship
out some product beginning tomorrow! I was also able to get the video viewing
software working on our website so customers can see their 8mm video and claim
what's theirs. Right now it's missing some videos that we haven't received back
yet. Here is the link to the video we do have:
http://www.digmypicsexpo.com/VideoRecovery.aspx The page will prompt
you to install a video player from Microsoft called Silverlight. It works on
Mac and PC, Explorer, Firefox and Safari.
It's a very small download and the link will appear on the page the first time
you load it. Silverlight is pretty much Microsoft's answer to Adobe's
Flash.
Use the Next and Prev buttons at the top to navigate through pages. There are
currently 11 pages of clips. Click an icon to watch a clip. If you recognize
a video as yours, note the VIDEO NAME: that appears under the running video
clip or on the thumbnail. Send us an email to let us know which videos
belong to you and we can compile them into one or more DVDs for you.
Monday June 9, 10:21 pm
The Internet connection at our office went down at about 11am this morning.
The outage happened at about the same time as Colby and I were making some changes
to the server so we thought we had caused the problem. Two and half hours
later and a lot of head scratching, we finally called MetroBridge. Turned out
they went down and all of their Arizona customers were without service.
It's still down now. So, we got our photo sharing site back up only to
have our internet connection go down. We used to maintain a backup connection
for just this kind of thing, but we didn't put one in for our temporary office
since we only plan to be there for another month of so.
I got a call from someone from our insurance company today and she was telling
me about a family she was helping find temporary housing this morning who had
just lost their child in a house fire. Stories like that sure make you
count your blessings and make you realize that things could always be so much
worse.
We get emails everyday from customers, vendors and strangers encouraging
us and even asking us when they will be able to send us their photos to scan.
Here's one of those messages we got today from someone in Florida that I thought
I'd share.
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I don't mean to waste any of your time. I'm
not a past customer
looking for my prints/slides. But I had planned to be a customer. I
was waiting on my husband to go thru his photos before sending them
all in. I guess his procrastination was a God-send. But since your
tragedy, I have been noting your updates. I am so impressed with
your dedication and resolve. I promise, that when you have caught
all up, and plan to reopen your business, that I will send my
precious memories to you. I have incredible confidence in what you
have done and what commitment you have demonstrated, that I wouldn't
think to trust my photos to anyone else. Please extend my thoughts
to your staff and wife. Please keep up the good work and know that
it is noticed and appreciated, even by those who haven't lost a thing
but gained confidence in the spirit of strangers.
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Now for the important business:
Annette asked me to post the following pictures that she's trying to match to
their owners and asked me to make the following note:
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We have images from a wedding reception for
Mr & Mrs. E Rissman & Sussman … I checked the backlog and we do not
have anyone with either of those last names… they are the younger couple
in a large group of slides that were uncovered, perhaps the man or woman
is a son or daughter or grandchild of the customer. Other slides in
this group include many images from Greece (I think) and the Rigat Park
Hotel.
We also have a group of Medical Slides – one of the slides is in regards
to an article “Changes in the differential white blood cell count in
screening for GroupB Streptoccal Sepsis” by Capt David Greenberg & Major
Bradley A Yoder. |
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Please let us know if you recognize these photos. |
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Found! |
Found! |
Saturday June 7, 10:11 pm
Colby and I made some progress on our infrastructure today. We got our
new CD duplication equipment in and set up and we did some testing. Looks
like we'll be able to start creating disks for customers on Monday or Tuesday.
I got our photo sharing site running. If you were a subscriber of our
photo sharing site, you can visit that site at its temporary domain address
of
http://www.digmypicsexpo.com/expo.
All of your digital photos should be there if we had completed and shipped your
job back to you or you had uploaded photos.
| Here's a picture from a batch of photos Annette discovered
but can't identify. If you recognize this photo, please let us
know. |
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FOUND! |
Here's a picture of Annette and Crystal working on scanning some of the mixed
together slides today. They were excited because they had just identified
a customer by looking through some scans they had just done.
You can see some of the photos hanging in the background that we're using to
help us match people to their photos.
Thursday June 5, 9:21 pm
The scanning portion of the recovery effort picked up this week. We are still
working on trimming burned edges from some prints that were singed. We're
working with a severely reduced production capacity since all of our equipment
was lost and our temporary building is 1/7 the size of our previous facility,
but we are running 3 shifts of 5-6 hrs each to keep the new machines running.
Once we have all the prints, slides and negatives scanned and enhanced, those
that have not been identified will be posted in a password protected area of
the website for our customers to help review and identify. Please keep in mind
that we have thousands and thousands of photos to scan (this is a good thing)
so this process will take a number of weeks. I realize its taking a long time
and nobody wants to complete and get people back their photos more than we do,
but we don't think it's to your benefit if we rush through things. We've
always worked hard to do high quality work even if it takes longer and this
is no different.
Footage from reels & tapes that have not been identified will also be posted
on the a password protected web site, we anticipate having this available this
weekend ( tomorrow if all goes well...) and we're going to try and
get our Real Time Scanning functionality back up and running.
Our burn equipment has finally arrived, we need to modify the program to burn
the images that were saved on the server to disk, we anticipate this being ready
by Monday or Tuesday.
Monday June 2, 5:21 pm
Annette's been compiling a list trying to inventory what we have recovered so
far. Here are some stats from that effort:
At the time of the fire, we had 195 orders in house.
Of those, we have 51 orders that we've been able to recover and identify completely
so far.
28 orders that we know we have at least something from.
That leaves 116 orders still unaccounted for but that doesn't mean we don't
have anything for those orders. We have thousands and thousands of slides
and negatives that were just jumbled together. Separating out who they
belong to requires scanning them and then posting them for everyone to see and
select. That's what we're busy working on right now.
Sunday June 1, 6:50am
There was news today of another tragic
fire involving the loss of old film archives. Part of the back
lot of universal studios and one of their tape vaults went up in flames
early this morning. Here is a
link to the story.
The story resonated with Annette and me, in fact, the aerial picture
of the building at Universal Studios looks surprising similar to our
building. As we watched the story on the news this afternoon,
it was like watching our story replayed, complete with firefighters
rescuing film archives. |
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| Fire struck Universal Studios'
Film Vaults Today |
The DigMyPics Building after our Fire |
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Thursday May 29, 9:50am
Here is a photo of the team working today on remounting slides.
We're really proud of how hard working and dedicated this team has been.
Wednesday May 28, 8:10am
Annette worked all day writing personal emails to some of the people who had
not already contacted us to let them know about the fire. We still have
a lot of customers whose photos or videos are in an unknown status.
We received the video from the 8mm film reels that we had sent out. Kyle
started working with that to sort it out. I ordered more equipment so
we can get our automated burn process going again. We have a lot of infrastructure
to build to support our operation and Colby helps me do much of that type of
thing but he's on a long planned rafting trip down the Colorado with his dad
this week. He's back this weekend so I hope he's thawed out and ready
to work by Monday morning.
Tuesday May 27, 8:10am
I took the weekend off from writing here, but Annette and I were plenty busy
with other matters. I built a new server and got our database up and running.
That allowed Annette to comb through orders and find out what we had and start
charting what we've recovered. I've been copying over the photos we had
stored on another server. It contains millions of photos and it's been
working all weekend to copy them over to the new servers. Annette
started notifying customers if we found their images stored on that server.
I think she enjoyed giving out some good news for a change.
Saturday May 24, 9:25pm
Last night I wrote that we got our servers back. They came with some strings,
however. Since the servers contain details about who entered and left
the building in our database and the manufacturer of the product suspected of
causing the fire may want have them examined, they've asked me to maintain them
in their current state and only copy off any data we want. Since its a
holiday weekend, none of the lawyers for that company could be found to respond
whether they want to examine the servers or not. Next week they may tell
us that they're satisfied with the data provided to them by the GFD forensics
team. That team spent 2 1/2 weeks examining the servers.
Now that we can get at the data, I plan on building a new server today so I
can load up the data to it, see what we have, and by sometime next week we should
be able to start notifying customers, processing refunds and matching photos
to job numbers. It will also give us a web server to start presenting
photos and videos to people so they can start identifying their property.
It seems unbelievable but between payroll, rent on the temporary office, and
the five computers and scanners we had to buy, we've already spent nearly $100,000
on this recovery operation. The insurance company was very quick to start
reimbursing us for the equipment we lost and we've been able to use that money
to help cover the other costs. They have an accounting firm working on
calculating the other expenses and suggest that they'll cover our other costs,
too. Regardless, we're committed to completing the task.
We've had several people write and ask us not to refund their money and to apply
it toward our recovery operation. Josh Friedman from the GFD said they're fielding
calls from people also wanting to donate. While it's humbling and greatly
appreciated, there are many other worthwhile causes. If you feel compelled
to help, please contact the GFD or your local fire department and see if you
can contribute to their firefighters fund.
On Thursday night we got an email from a single father raising his daughter.
His wife and childhood sweetheart from the 2nd grade died of cancer at the young
age of 31. He had sent us all of the pictures he had of his wife and their
lives together so that he could have them preserved for his daughter.
He's blogged about his fight with their insurance company here:
http://www.jennyslaw.blogspot.com/
His email brought Annette to tears. She didn't sleep that night. He sent
in some digital pictures so we could identify them and Annette sifted through
thousands of prints on Friday trying to find whatever she could for the family.
She was able to find and sort out some of his photos. She's planning
on continuing that quest today. UPDATE: we found these photos on our server.
On Thursday afternoon we returned some 8mm reels that we had transferred
before the fire. The job was done and was one of the lucky ones waiting for
pickup that survived mostly unscathed. We're learning a lot about the
families that we've been working with. This particular family lives about a
mile from us. Their whole lives they've taken in the sickest of the sick
foster children to help care for them. More than 25 sick kids over the years
have benefited from the kindness of this family. When Annette stopped
by his house to deliver him his film she witnessed this first hand. A young
child was there in that house connected to tubes watching TV. Knowing
about the incredible selflessness of this family and seeing that baby she had
no intention of collecting payment but the customer insisted. He asked
her to wait while he got his checkbook. She told him no, we're not going
to charge you. He insisted. She said, "but I don't even know how much
it is". He said he did, as he had just looked up the invoice in his email.
He wrote her a check for $304 and said "You take this. Every bit helps
and I want you to start that business back up. You were doing good things for
people." She thanked him but when she got home she voided the check and
put it in a frame that is now at our office. We think it's a symbol of
the incredible generosity and kindness we've experienced over the past several
weeks.
Friday May 23, 10:05pm
I have a lot to write about today, but I've been going non-stop all day.
I'll write more tomorrow morning. The big news is that we got our servers
back, sort of... We can at least make copies of the data we need.
Josh at GFD and Kim at American Family worked fast to make that happen today.
Much appreciated. :-)
We've got all of the photos that had been recovered in a stable state. The team
has been working hard and tirelessly. Since everything is stabilized we
decided it was time to give everyone a day off. Actually, two; Sunday and Monday.
Thursday May 22, 5:10pm
We have some prints that we can't put a name to. As soon as we find the owner,
I'll remove the link to the photos.
One set has a little girl named Lauren and pictures of her first communion (FOUND!).
Another set is of a young couple that is very active
hiking, snorkeling, etc. (FOUND!)
The third set are some really nice black and whites and were found in a Brides
Book. (FOUND!)
If you recognize these photos please send us an email to
sales@digmypics.com.
Still no servers...
Wednesday May 21, 10:45 pm
We still don't have our servers back and they keep telling us tomorrow, always
tomorrow. There was some news yesterday about the fire. They concluded
their investigation and called it an "electrical event" which was most likely
caused by a particular piece of equipment that was in the building. A
representative for that manufacturer was present yesterday to study the evidence
and then all of the evidence was sealed and taken away for detailed study in
a lab. The insurance company will pursue it further and then begin a process
called subrogation to recover their costs.
They turned the building back over to us at 6pm yesterday evening.
It was the first time we'd been able to freely enter the site and look around
and touch things. I went around and opened up any PCs that I could find
and extracted and recovered 22 hard drives. Considering that we had hundreds
of hard drives, 22 is a very small number. The video department yielded
the most hard drives by far. We're going to try and recover what we can,
but the solder on the circuit boards on many of the drives was melted away.
Those boards can be removed and swapped out but the heat may have done in the
magnetic media inside the drive or warped the platter. Annette and I also
recovered some of my grandmother's photos buried under ash and tar paper in
what was my office. They were in terrible condition. I found the last
picture ever taken of my father before he died but the image suffered so much
damage the photo was unrecoverable.
We should be getting the video transfers back by the end of the week. Next
week we can invite those customers who had 8mm film or video tape with us to
a site to see what we have and let them identify theirs for us.
We've had several people ask if they could come to our facility and find
their pictures or help us in the recovery. We appreciate the offer to
help and I understand wanting to take action. I'm the kind of person that would
have a hard time sitting still and waiting, too. But it's in everyone's
best interest that we organize and recover everything in an orderly fashion
so that everything gets proper treatment. Allowing anyone or everyone
in could jeopardize that process.
It's taking longer than anyone expected to complete the task and I appreciate
your patience. The silver lining to that statement, of course, is that
we have a so much more than we expected.
Tuesday May 20, 11:30 am
Last night Julie Hathaway, a manager at DigMyPics, asked me if she could address
our customers in a letter. Julie has really taken charge of managing everyone's
schedules and communicating between all of us. She has been a tremendous help
by really taking ownership of managing the recovery operation. Here is Julie's
letter:
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My name is Julie and I am one of the managers at DigMyPics. I have
been working there for three years and I may have communicated with
many of you on the phone or via email.
I would like to thank our customers for all of the support that has
poured in since the day of the fire. The customers were the first thing
on my mind when I heard about the tragedy. I felt physically sick to
think that we would have to give each of you such horrible news. It
has been inspiring to see emails from customers and then later unearth
some of their memories from the ash covered bins. The last order that
I worked on, on Friday May 2nd, was actually the first order we found
from a customer named Lisa D. I was quite surprised that most of the
3,000 prints somehow survived. With information from customers we are
slowly placing faces to names and that has been rewarding.
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This was a really great job and we were
a close group of people working together. It has been difficult to think
that my desk is no longer there and that I will not get to see my friends
in the office every morning. We are working together in small groups
now and it is nice to see faces, but the task is so daunting that there
are not as many smiles in the building anymore. Even though this is
a difficult job, I want you all to know that the employees of DigMyPics
are determined to get this gritty work done as soon as possible and
restore the images.
Thank you for your thoughts and prayers.
Julie Hathaway
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Amber and Andy are painstakingly cutting slides out of their melted slide plastic
sheets.
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Kristen is pulling the film out of this fused together slide carousel with surprising
success.
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Yusup is removing the film from charred and damaged slides mounts.
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Candice cleans the slide film while Mark and Crystal remount it.
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