DigMyPics.com ( About us
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Thursday May 8, 2008
To our customers and friends,
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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.
GFD = Gilbert Fire Department
On Monday, we contacted the major couriers and asked them to return any shipments
bound for us to their sender. If you sent us something scheduled to arrive
this week, expect it to be returned to you.
All of the local Phoenix stations carried the story. Here is the story as reported
by
Fox News 10 and here is the story on
ABC15.com
Thursday, May 8 2:04 am
We've received an overwhelming amount of sympathy and encouragement from friends,
customers and the community. Most of the messages we're receiving are
quite incredible. Some have moved us to tears.
We continue to be impressed by the professionalism and care shown by the Gilbert
Fire Department. Wednesday morning we were introduced to a team of people
they have assembled to sort through any recovered material and collect and box up
any photos and videos found. We were encouraged by what they were finding
in the morning, but what we saw then was the bulk of what was to be recovered.
By the afternoon they had completed the entire production area and had recovered
only around 10 boxes full of photos and a box of 8mm reels. We may have no
way to know who the photos or videos belong to. What we plan to do is digitize
and restore everything and anything that we have and any without an owner will be
made available to everyone that had materials in the building. Those people
can review the material and download what's theirs. It might take a few weeks
to complete this process. I'll continue to write here as we progress.
We've had a few people write interested in recovering their money. We're
planning on refunding everything to anyone that had anything in the building but
it may take us some time to sort through who that is. Please don't file
a dispute with your credit card yet. That will complicate our task and increase
our costs as the credit card company charges us a substantial fee for every dispute
they receive.
We are receiving emails at sales@digmypics.com
but we aren't able to respond to every message. We will in the coming
days try to work through them.
Thursday May 8 2:45pm
A lot has happened in the last 12 hours since my previous post so I wanted to take
a minute to write an update.
The Gilbert Fire Dept (GFD) and their support team CERT has spared nothing to recover
our customer's memories. We stored each order in a plastic, sealable tote.
The fire melted many of these totes into tiny pods, encasing their contents in the
plastic. The CERT team has been cracking open these pods and finding some
stuff in pristine condition.
While Annette and I were at the site this morning, the fire chief, Wes Kemp, told
us his team was attempting a rescue of some bins that we had kept up front near
our servers for local customers awaiting pickup. The roof in that area remained
attached to the wall but a section of it fell down at an angle and remained perched
on top of our server server racks and these bins. A large A/C unit was also
on that section of the roof. Wes's team has been determined to save as
much as possible for our customers and they had their sites set on recovering these
bins. They brought in some equipment to delicately lift the roof while firefighters
crawled under debris and pulled them out. Everything was a little wet but
in very good condition. One of these customers was Melinda, the customer who
appeared in the Fox10 story.
We need to thank the fine people at American Family Insurance. They've
been facilitating the efforts of the fire department by allowing them to release
customer material. They've assembled a team of people that have come together
to help us figure out what's what.
I hope people don't mind, but we continue to be touched by the outpouring of
support and help. I'm going to post some of those messages
here. Maybe they'll help others the way they're helping us.
See some of the messages from customers
Thursday May 8, 5:51pm
We just met with Fire investigators who have finished their investigation and are
turning the site over to the insurance company. They isolated a 10x10 area
where the fire started. They suspect electrical wiring. An electrical engineer
from the insurance company will be working on that tomorrow.
Here are some photos of the fire and devastation if you're
up for it.
Friday May 9, 4:05 - 9:32
Annette and I are exhausted. Except for the death of my grandmother 14 years
ago, this has been the most difficult and emotional week I've ever experienced.
We haven't stopped since 2am Monday morning. We've barely slept or eaten.
Speaking of grandmothers, I lost the photos of both of my grandmothers. They
had been sitting in my office waiting for a lull in the business that never happened.
Fortunately, my maternal grandmother had her 86th birthday in March and Annette
had pushed to put a video together for her so her photos had been recently digitized.
My other grandmother's photos are gone. I was the custodian of all of her stuff.
The incredibly kind people at HomeMovieDepot.com reached out to us on Tuesday to
offer their help. Here's the letter. We've
worked with the company in the past and we've always considered them to be the
best in the video and film transfer business for consumer level video. We
strived to model the 8mm video transfer portion of our business after theirs.
They are currently working with the video film and seven video tapes GFD recovered
from the fire.
The Restoration Progress
We fear we've lost a lot but we're also surprised by what's been saved.
Our team is working through the boxes of photos that GFD rescued. The work
is difficult but I think we all feel that it's also rewarding and will help
us heal a little. We decided to run two 4 hour shifts 7 days a week so we
can rotate people out while we get through the recovery and digitization process
of the photos.
We've got a lot of prints and slides, very few negatives. It seems like
stuff that was in hard plastic, like a carousel, fared the worse. Ziplock bags,
seemed to do well. Some stuff we find completely encased in plastic and we
can chisel it out almost like finding a nugget of gold in the side of a mountain.
Saturday May 10, 10:05pm
There's not a lot of news to report. We had a larger team working today going
through the photos and getting them cleaned. Several customers emailed
us some digital photos so we would know who to look for in their photos. The
large files exceeded our limits so some email started bouncing back. I increased
the limits so it shouldn't be a problem again. If you sent an email but got
a 'mailbox size limit exceeded' message, please resend it. Our apologies
and gratitude to our employees and their mothers for working on Mothers Day to help
get this done as soon as possible. We've been scrambling to get our makeshift
office up and running.
Sunday May 11, 9:25am
Some customers have begun sending us information to help us identify their materials.
We appreciate that and we're going to post the information in the office where
we're working. I encourage you to send us such information but, try to
make it as concise as possible. Two or three photos that contain most of the people
in your family, for instance, rather than a picture for each person in your family.
The smaller the breadth of information we have, the easier it will be for everyone
to remember as their going through the material.
Tomorrow we're going to make an effort to retrieve our servers from the fire
department. They told us the hard drives of those servers look ok but they
haven't given us more than that. Computers in the production area don't
look like they'll yield much. You can see a scanning station in one of the photos I posted.
Sunday May 11, 5:53 pm
Julie, Priscilla, Emily, and Will stuck it out and worked with Annette and me all
weekend long. A special BIG THANK YOU to them. Nick, Liz, Kristen, Colby,
Kyle and Hardev also helped out in a big way either Saturday or Sunday.
Thanks for the help. It's much appreciated.
Monday May 12, 4:05pm
Our recovery effort underway
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We continue to see an outpouring of help from many unexpected places. Today,
members of the LDS church heard about our story and wanted to help. They actually
brought us out some tables we could us to work on. Thanks Bishop Terry.
The CEO from Metrobridge, our internet service provider, personally called from
Vancouver and promised to get our service relocated to our new place by tomorrow.
We had a lot of people able to work today so we'll start seeing real results
soon. The process is very labor intensive. Many customers have sent
us a couple of pictures to help us identify them. We've put them on a board
and posted it on the wall. Its pretty emotional to see that. We continue to get
emails of encouragement from customers. Thanks for that. I'm going
to post some more now on that page.
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Tuesday May 13, 7:15pm
Metrobridge was unable to install their service at our new location. We're trying
to get a measly DSL line from Qwest. A T1 takes almost 2 months to have installed.
We were in such a hurry to rent a place, and we found a place right in town. We
never considered getting internet service would be a challenge.
We've been finding the photos of people who have written. There is a kind of
air of excitement when we put a family to the photos we have. We're going to
start contacting people as soon as we can. Being without Internet or phones at the
facility means we have to do it from home.
HomeMovieDepot has been working on the film we sent them. So far they've invoiced
us for 25,000 feet of film so we're encouraged that they've saved a lot.
Possibly 25% of the film we had at the time of the fire. It may not sound like a
large percentage, but substantially better than 0. Most of the film was unidentifiable
so once they return the film and digital files to us, everyone will have to watch
what we have and hope we have something, anything, that belongs to them.
We've received a lot of email and we're being asked to reply. We're
getting your emails but please don't expect much in the way of correspondence
until we can catch our collective breath and get on top of the more critical issues.
Thanks for being patient with us. We have been contacting those for whom we
have complete orders. Specifically, the local people who had their completed
orders recovered by the GFD. We're also planning on contacting a few people
who we have recognized.
Wednesday May 14, 5:45 pm
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Not much news today. Everyone is just chugging through the photos. We're
battling with some technical issues on how to scan some of the more damaged and
warped prints. We're inventing some new techniques as we go along.
Fortunately we have some very smart and innovative people working to figure out
some of the new challenges. (That's a plug for Nick, Colby and Tobin)
I had designed and built a new print scanner and we had two prototypes at our facility.
They're gone now, but my software code was still on my laptop so Tobin and I
rebuilt the hardware yesterday and today using some of the major parts I still had
at home for a third machine I wanted to build. We're going to try to get it
working tomorrow. What's unique about it is that it captures an image from above
the print and uses vacuum pressure to keep the print flat. It's also much
faster than a flatbed scanner and the quality is just a good as our Epson flatbeds
and in some cases better, since some objects can't scan well on a flatbed.
Metrobridge's techs showed back up today with some ideas on how to bring in
their service. They're still there working on it now and think they've
found a way. I know it involved a very tall pole and a lot of determination on Sergio's
part.
The Arizona Republic published a couple stories about the fire and our recovery
efforts:
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2008/05/13/20080513gr-fire0514-on.html
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/0514evfire0514.html
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May 15, 9:15pm
No significant news to report today.
May 17, 8:45am
We continue to work through the photos we have. We have way more than we ever thought.
(That's a good thing, of course, but it's going to take longer than we first
calculated.) GFD still hasn't returned our servers to us, but they did
tell us that they are in good condition and likely usable. They still haven't
publicly released a cause for the fire but they have led us to believe it may involve
a product liability suit against a manufacturer.
I've been dealing this week with one customer who decided to attack Annette
and me using the text I'm writing here as one of his weapons. It's
made me a little guarded in what I would say but this morning I decided not to let
this one jerk interfere with the good work we're doing for our other customers.
He's not the only one, either. Another customer decided to have her lawyer send
us a terse and threatening letter. It's unfortunate that such people exist
but, fortunately, they're a small minority. Everyone else has been incredibly
kind and helpful. The two attacks have put me on the defensive so I'm going
to make some comments about what our legal responsibility is and isn't and what
we are and are not doing. I apologize if the following language comes across as
harsh or cold.
Here are the terms and conditions by which everyone agreed
when they submitted an order to us. Those terms limit our responsibility to
a maximum of $100 or the cost to replace the physical media (like a roll of film
or a VHS tape) whichever is less. The terms are standard in the industry since
no price can be placed on a photograph that could never be reproduced.
ABOUT REFUNDS. PLEASE NOTE: If we were unable
to return a finished product to you, we will also refund any payments you had made.
We can't begin to do that however, until GFD returns our database to us.
The day of the fire our insurance adjuster asked us what liability we had for the
customer's photos we had in the building. I described our terms to him
and he was quite relieved knowing we could just pay a maximum of $100 to everyone,
bulldoze the place and move on. Annette and I didn't quite see it in such financial
terms, however. We immediately knew we wanted to recover whatever could be
recovered and return any thing, even if its just one photo, to their owners.
The insurance company really has no interest in recovering the photos. They
did allow us to remove them quickly from the building and they haven't
interfered but they think we're nuts for bothering and I'm not sure how
much financial support we'll be able to get them to contribute toward our effort.
Legal obligations aside, Annette and I felt a moral obligation to undertake this
task, possibly at great personal expense. Many people have written to tell
us how much they appreciate what we're doing.
Secondly, Let me set the expectation with regard to our recovery and restoration
effort. We have no plans to try and restore or preserve the physical photos
and videos in our possession. Most are in poor condition. We're simply
working to clean and dry the materials so that we can digitize them. Any restoration
work we perform will be on the digital photos and videos. Depending on the
condition of the materials, we may or may not return the originals to our customers.
We may not even have the originals to return. Some photos or videos exist
solely on the servers. We may not even be able to match the owners up. We're
doing what we can. In cases where we can match photos or videos to their owner,
we will want to return those items if possible. We've had some success
with that already.
Hopefully I can put this nasty part behind us and focus on helping the kind people
that have been so gracious.
Saturday May 17, 6:29pm
I've held back on showing any pictures of what we've been given to work
because its so hard to look at but maybe its time.
I took these photos about a week ago. The two photos shown below are not from
the same batch. We've since completed our recovery work on the prints
we had. They're now getting scanned.
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This is about as good as it gets. These chunks of charcoal have actually been
salvageable though. We've been able to soak these bricks until they soften
then we can peel each photo apart one by one. We let each photo dry, then
trim each and every photo to remove the char.
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After breaking the brick apart, each print is allowed to dry. Once these prints
have dried, they will each be trimmed and scanned.
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Sunday May 18, 9:00pm
Tomorrow morning marks 2 weeks since the fire. We're working hard and
everyone is tired (and sometimes a little cranky. huh Priscilla?) but we are starting
to feel like we're getting somewhere. We have matched a lot of photos
to their owners. Annette's been trying to contact people to let them know
and to ask questions if we're unsure. We have a system in place to help
us track what came from where so when we digitize, we can go back and find a particular
photo if we need to. It's exciting and relieving when we discover a group
of photos and can identify them.
Our servers and our back up systems
Many people have asked us about or even shaken their fingers at our backup strategy
wondering how we couldn't have offsite backups of all the photos. We had
several backup strategies deployed to protect against a server failure or hard drive
failures. We've suffered many hard drive failures in the past and those
strategies served us well. But the truth is, I never envisioned such a devastating
failure of every machine at once in such complete destruction. It just seemed
like such a remote possibility.
Usually by the time a customer's order left our building, their photos would
exist on 3 different computers for at least 14 days. (we always claimed 14 days,
but we really tried to keep everything for a month). This gave us comfort
that should anything happen during their return, we could always reproduce the disks
and send out new sets.
No offsite backup of all those photos?
In our work, we created and edited several terabytes of data every single day using
more than 100 different computers. Its an extremely large amount of data by
any standard and moving that much data from that many computers over the internet
to another location would have been extremely costly and impractical. The cost of
the bandwidth we would need to move that much data during the 6.5 hours nobody was
working (12:30 am to 7am) would have been in the tens of thousands of dollars a
month and possibly more than our entire revenue. We did offer an offsite
storage service we called Expo for a small additional charge, but we didn't
move the photos from our facility to the off site location until a few days after
we shipped the photos back. We did things this way because many people would ask
us to rearrange and rename folders and it was better to do that before we copied
the files to the offsite servers. Customers that had an Expo account still have
their photos stored there. We had a very fast Internet connection of 10Mbs
(Mega bits per second) dedicated up and down but it wasn't nearly fast enough
to copy the large volume of data we produced, even if we maximized it's use
24/7. A T1, which is what most businesses our size would have, is 1.5Mbs up
and down. Your cable connection is probably rated at 10Mbs down and 1Mbs up
but its shared between you and your neighbors so you probably get much less than
that.
We've been getting questions about whether we'll have the photos or videos
on our servers that are to be returned to us by the GFD. The answer is, it
depends. Prior to finalizing an order, we would process all of the photos
and videos for posting on our website. During that processing, we would create copies
of the photos in various resolutions ranging from roughly 100x100 pixels to 1200x1200
pixels. We stored those copies on the servers that are now in GFD's possession.
This allowed our customers to quickly view their photos on our website.
What about our database? No backup of that?
We actually had several backups of our database, one was kept in real-time and another
was made nightly. We had also kept our database offsite, but two weeks prior
to the fire we had let an employee go. Before that employee left, he decided to
damage his computer to make it inoperable. He was a technical guy and had
access to our offsite servers and databases. We already had a plan in place
to move all of our data processing in house but to avoid any further damage or possible
theft of data by this employee I decided to accelerate the move. We were in
the process of redesigning our backup database strategies when the fire happened.
The timing was just bad. Fortunately, we've been told that those servers are
fine.
I've worked at companies large and small. For a company our size, we had
very good technology and strong data policies in place but nothing could have prepared
us for what was to come. I suppose its easy now though to look back and say
we should have done more.
Monday May 19, 6:00pm
Some of what we're finding has a note or a folder title or some other piece
of information to help us identify and match it to someone. Annette has been
making educated guesses on who she thinks it might belong to and then asking those
people for confirmation. Some items she's unsure of so she asked me to post
some of the tidbits of information here so that anyone looking can write in and
say its theirs. Click here to see the list.
Tomorrow afternoon we're meeting with the fire inspectors from GFD and American
Family Insurance. They've invited the manufacturer of the suspected equipment
to review their evidence and respond. It should be an interesting meeting.
The site of the fire has been off limits and under 24 hour guard until this company
has had time to review the site and the evidence. No one has been able to
visit the site or touch anything without escort.
Server Status Update
We're still waiting....The servers are being used as evidence. We had
11 cameras in and around the building monitoring and recording onto two DVR's.
One of the DVRs recording 8 cameras survived, the other was found completely melted.
We also had 4 Internet cameras monitoring and alerting motion. That data has
been captured and studied by the forensics department of GFD, mostly to show that
no one had been in or around the building prior to the fire. The servers also
tracked entry to and exit from our building using a biometric entry system that
allowed entry, tracked entry in our database, and armed and disarmed the alarm.
We also had an extensive internet traffic router logging system that we used to
watch for and alert about hackers.
All that data was also stored and is being used to support the investigation.
That's why its taking so long to get it all back but GFD expects to be able
to release them this week. We're hoping. It will make our job much easier.
Not only will we have a detailed inventory of who's orders we had, but we captured
and stored one or more images in our database of the contents we received for each
order. Those images will help us identify and match more people with their
property.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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The DigMyPics Building after our Fire
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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.
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.
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.
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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!
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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.
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!
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Found!
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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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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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.
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
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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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.
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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.
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Click to view video
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Tuesday July 22 3:30 pm
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.
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.
August 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 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