Earthquake Safety for Book Collections

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Jennifer Kimball and one behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you how to organize and maintain your book collection. Now, we talked about making sure your books are placed on bookshelves so they're not going to fall off the edges, but what about if you live in an earthquake zone? Then you need to take some extra precautions. If you're going to have stand alone bookcases, you want to make sure they're firmly place on the floor. You want them too far against the wall as they'll go. If you have base boards along the bottom, you want to make sure that your bookcase has a cut out so that it still goes flat against the wall around the base board. You also want to secure your bookshelves to the wall. You can buy brackets that attach at the very top to attach it to the wall. You can also go through if you have a really steady bookcase with a solid back, you can go through the back of the bookcase into the studs in your wall. Where you have bookcases next to another, you want to make sure that they're fastened together as well. If you're lucky enough to have built in bookcases, which are going to be the safest in an earthquake, you might also want things that are having a stop put on the edge of each of your bookcases. You can either have a small edge put along the edge to keep books from falling out. You can also have your shelves tilted back at a very slight angle, which will help prevent books from flying. The biggest thing you want to worry about is making sure that your bookcase is not going to tip over in an earthquake and that you prevent as many books as possible from flying off. Both of these can cause serious injuries in case of an earthquake."