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An investment in 2014 paid off for the University of Vermont -- and the botany world in general -- on Friday.
As a fire burned on the roof of Vermont’s Pringle Herbarium, the third largest in New England, the majority of the plants were safe and sound. In 2014, Vermont won a $470,000 National Science Foundation grant to upgrade its storage for the herbarium's 300,000 historic and rare plants, placing them in water- and fireproof cabinets.
Without those cabinets, either the fire -- or the gushing water from firefighters' hoses -- could have spelled doom for the plants. Damage was only done to items yet to be processed and still outside the cabinets, the institution said.
“If we didn’t have the funding support from the National Science Foundation, which provided us full replacement of the old cabinets, the material would have been incinerated. We would have lost the whole thing,” Dave Barrington, curator of the Pringle Herbarium, said in a release. “And we have to give credit to the firefighters, because they made some excellent decisions.”
Firefighters entered the building and placed tarps over the cabinets to add another layer of fire protection.
The herbarium is named for Cyrus Pringle, a botanist from Charlotte, Vt., who collected more than 500,000 specimens before his death in 1911, 12 percent of which were entirely new to science.
