The children's room and adult fiction sections of the Concord Public Library were closed Monday after a ceiling leak.

On Sunday afternoon, sensors in the building detected the leak, according to Library Director Todd Fabian, and water had come down through the ceiling in the children's room and pooled down on the first floor. 

“It was a bad situation,” Fabian said, “but it could’ve been a lot worse.” 

The leak appeared to be related to the building’s HVAC, Fabian said, and parts of the library were closed to assess the damage. A few hundred library items were affected by the leak, he said, but how many books are a loss won’t be known for a few days. 

The library has had a few sizeable leaks of this kind in the last few years: one about a year ago in a room that used to house the library’s servers and one a few years back in the Concord Room, according to Fabian. The former server room no longer houses much computer equipment but still has the electrical conduit to support them, Fabian noted. The Concord Room houses the library’s historical archives. 

Sensors flagging the leak relatively early were key to limiting the damage, Fabian said. As the 1940s building and its HVAC show their age, he said he’s looking into further preventative measures like those sensors. 

In the meantime, dehumidifiers and industrial fans are running to help dry things out. Librarians can still retrieve books from those sections and the library is otherwise open, if not noisy, Fabian said. It will fully reopen by the end of the week. 

Catherine McLaughlin can be reached at cmclaughlin@cmonitor.com. You can follow her on X @cat_mclaugh and subscribe to her newsletter The City Beat at concordmonitor.com.