A year after floods ravaged the University of Hawai'i-Manoa campus, destroying parts of Hamilton Library, basic services are back up, with students using research material, digital databases and studying till all hours. But the library's one-acre basement — once home to a rich collection of rare maps and documents — sits empty, with no reconstruction date in sight.

On the other end of the campus, world-famous mouse-cloner Ryuzo Yanagimachi and his Institute for Biogenesis Research is fully functional again, its lab space rebuilt and all of its precious data recovered.

Yet other key researchers in the Biomedical Sciences building still struggle, their labs and office space destroyed, years of research lost and no hint of when — or if — they will receive money to replace lost data, specimens or collections.

On the surface, it seems like business as usual at the university. The $12 million clean-up is complete, parts of the campus have been rebuilt and the fall semester is in full swing.

But there is still much left to be done.

"Things look very normal. But in reality, it is anything but," said Bob Schwarzwalder, assistant university librarian. "It continues to be a Herculean effort."

Most of the first floor of the Biomedical Sciences building has yet to be rebuilt, and the reconstruction of Hamilton Library's basement is still in design. Most of the damage to UH-Manoa occurred in these two buildings, and it could be years before either is completely restored.

UH officials continue to grapple with issues such as intellectual property loss, drafting a disaster management plan and designing flood mitigation measures that would help prevent a flood from causing this type of damage again.

And flood recovery is not the only issue university officials have to deal with. "There is an awful lot happening at the university," said Gary Ostrander, vice chancellor of research and graduate education. "The whole flood thing is extra work on top of what we have to do."

Administrators said much has been accomplished this past year, however.

"Getting the library up and running; getting the students back into classes; finding acceptable space for our faculty and researchers — even if it is temporary; these are small steps to achieving normalcy," said Neal Smatresk, vice chancellor for academic affairs.

And despite fears that research money could be lost as a result of the flood damage, the university just recorded its best quarter ever — $164 million in research income, university officials say.

$83.4M DAMAGE TO UH

Nearly 10 inches of rain sent Manoa Stream over its banks and rampaging through the valley and the UH campus a year ago today, knocking out power to more than 35 buildings on campus, damaging more than 120 homes in the valley, destroying UH research laboratories and, in many cases, setting the work of UH scientists back months or years.

It was one of the costliest natural disasters in state history, amounting to more than $90 million in damage overall, $83.4 million of that at the UH campus, according to UH officials. The cost does not include losses to intellectual property. State Civil Defense estimates flood damage at $72 million, not including residential losses, but noted that the figure is not yet final.

The university has spent at least $20 million on recovery so far. That has been covered primarily by a $25 million insurance reimbursement and other state sources. The university also can count on reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for some projects. The university would spend money up front and work with FEMA to determine which projects are eligible for 75 percent federal assistance.

Also, earlier this month, U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawai'i, said UH-Manoa could receive as much as $20 million to replace educational and research material. Inouye included the request in the 2006 Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Bill, which is awaiting final approval by the House and Senate.

NOT HALFWAY DONE

Even with the money that has been spent so far, reconstruction is not even halfway complete, said Sam Callejo, UH vice president for administration.

That's mostly because the reconstruction of Hamilton Library and the Biomedical Sciences building make up the bulk of the rebuilding costs, said Kathleen Cutshaw, vice chancellor for administration, finance and operations.

Nearly half the damage occurred at Hamilton Library, where the entire basement, which makes up about 15 percent of the total library space, sits empty after the loss of about $34 million in rare documents, maps and books — more than 3 million items in all.

Flooding not only decimated the library's collection but displaced dozens of offices, scores of students and faculty from the Library and Information Science Program, and areas where the public could once view government maps and documents.

"It could take years to restore those collections" and move faculty and students back to their original locations, Schwarzwalder said.

Generally, the administration is viewed as having done a relatively good job in responding to a "really unprecedented and very difficult" disaster, said Robert Bley-Vroman, chairman of the Manoa Faculty Senate. But now "it's a question of whether there will be a quick response when the next disaster happens," and what can be done to prepare better, he said.

And more issues linger, like how the university will handle the loss of research and intellectual property.

That decision would greatly affect Terrence Lyttle, a UH geneticist who lost nearly 70 percent of 30 years' worth of research.

A year ago, Lyttle was hip-deep in water, attempting to salvage anything from his laboratory that he could. Today, his lab is gone and his research virtually stalled.

Lyttle, like dozens of other UH researchers, is now confined to a small, temporary office where piles of books and boxes are yet to be unpacked in hopes he will one day move into a new, permanent lab.

"Nothing has been said to us as faculty about insurance money," he said. "It's tricky how these issues will work out."

Lyttle likened his work to a fruit tree that had been growing for 30 years.

"Say frost killed more than half of the tree and all you're left with are a couple of branches, what would you do?"

What Lyttle decided to do was nurse the few branches he had left. For now, he has latched on to other labs, incorporating the little data and specimens he did salvage into other people's research.

"I'm now a guest in other labs."

As for resuming his own work, "without the other branches you can't complete the research," he said.

Lyttle's loss was as much personal as it was professional. While trudging through his mud-caked office in the days after the flood, he contracted leptospirosis, a sometimes-fatal bacterial illness.

Today, aftereffects such as occasional loss of balance and forgetfulness linger, he said.

Ostrander, the vice chancellor for research and graduate education, said there is no clear answer for how lost intellectual property will be compensated.

Many things are irreplaceable, Ostrander said.

WORK IN PROGRESS

The first floor of the biomedical building, where Lyttle once was housed, has been essentially uninhabitable all year. Yanagimachi's Institute for Biogenesis Research, in the E-wing, recently fully reopened after a $320,000 reconstruction with little to no loss of research data. But other parts of the biomedical building have yet to be rebuilt.

Yanagimachi and his partner, Steven Ward, once worried that years of data would be lost when floodwaters hit most of the computers on the first floor.

"We've recovered quite well compared to the rest of the medical school," Ward said.

"Recovery has been such a massive undertaking," said Sam Shomaker, interim dean of the university's John A. Burns School of Medicine. Researchers are beginning to move into the new Kaka'ako medical school facilities, and more researchers will likely move back into rebuilt areas of the biomed building on the Manoa campus once it is complete, Shomaker said.

Reconstruction of two courts and the entire first floor of the main part of the biomedical building likely will be completed by March 2006, Cutshaw said. A project to improve drainage at the building is in the design phases, she said.

Meanwhile, initial fears that research grant money would be affected have been calmed, Ostrander said. Some researchers may have been set behind in submitting proposals for grant money, and others may be behind in collecting data for research funded by grants, he said. But that hasn't stopped the university from reporting a record $164 million in research for the first quarter of the year, he said.

"We've never had a quarter with this much money," he said.

Tom Schroeder, director of the Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, offered a slightly different perspective: "It will take several years to see the implications of the flood on grant money," Schroeder said.

DISASTER PLAN IN WORKS

As the university continues reconstruction, it is also rethinking its disaster management plan, which was criticized in the days and weeks after the flood.

Callejo said the university has been drafting a new systemwide disaster plan that will include new evacuation procedures for faculty, students and campus residents; procedures for aircraft accidents, bomb threats, tsunamis, floods, hurricanes and explosions; and the designation of a first-response emergency team that would handle the next catastrophe.

Schroeder, who is heading the committee reviewing Manoa's disaster plan, said it would be completed by the end of the year. The committee also is considering a wide range of plans that would potentially prevent a flood like this from happening again.

"No one thought there was a possibility of flooding on this campus. New thought has to go into how to handle something like this," he said.

But administrators such as Smatresk say because of the nature of the bureaucracy, it will be a long time before any of those plans or projects are completed.

"All of this is very preliminary," Smatresk said.

Reach Loren Moreno at lmoreno@honoluluadvertiser.com.