Fire and ice: a soot removal technique using dry ice blasting

A welder?ÇÖs spark touched off the attic fire in the Sevier County Recorders Office (Richfield, Utah, USA) on 2 May 2006, igniting a blaze that ripped through the crawl space and greedily consumed the building?ÇÖs paper-backed insulation. The fuel readily spent, the fire burned itself out 15 minutes later, sparing the structure but coating everything below the rafters with fine, powdery soot. This carbonaceous residue filtered down through the ceiling tiles and settled on everything in the offices below, including the historic courthouse record books stored horizontally on metal rolling shelves within the vault. Approximately 300 nineteenth- and twentieth-century full-leather spring-back stationers?ÇÖ bindings, many covered in protective white canvas jackets, were untouched by the fire but impregnated with a layer of soot and reeked of smoke.