On the morning of Friday, February 17, 2006, a fire destroyed the CARES Foundation offices, taking with it everything we had including our server that contained our database, files and materials. Initial investigations into this three-alarm blaze point to faulty wiring as the cause. We are absolutely heartbroken.
Courtesy WABC NY - Fire Blazing from CARES Office Windows
The day after the fire, Meryl, Adam (my husband) and I went to see the damage. It was scary - parts of the floor and walls were missing, but the staircase was intact. The damage to the building was massive. We carefully went up to our offices to survey everything.
In the debris, we saw a glint of silver aluminum under a piece of sheetrock. It was the back up hard drive and it was – marginally - intact. It clearly had been burned, was wet, but the aluminum case may have protected the hard drive. So, perhaps some of the data can be saved. We have taken the computers and hard drive to supposedly one of the best data recovery companies in the country - they recovered 99% of the data from the Space Shuttle Columbia, but are warned that the costs can be astronomical - maybe more than $25,000.
Sadly, we were very underinsured - as most nonprofits are, and of course we never anticipated a loss of this magnitude. - We only had $13,000 in renter's insurance. We cannot even estimate the costs of rebuilding, since years of data and documents may be lost on the computers. Of course, we lost all of our materials, library of journal articles, our physician referral list, etc. It will take many, many hours to recreate all of this. We also have a big grant to the NIH for CAH research we are supposed to fund, so we can't afford to divert these funds.
If you have any suggestions, or any resources we would really appreciate your help. If you know of any really rich angels, we sure could use one right now. Thanks so much for anything you can do.
The good news is our website is still up and running. Please help us rebuild our database by re-registering with CARES via our Join Us page. Also, please ask anyone you know that is affected by CAH, their family members and donors to do the same. This is the information we really need.
Prior to the fire, we did manage to post our Winter Newsletter to the site. It is available in our Newsletter Archive for your reading pleasure.
Finally, please bear with us if we are not prompt in our replies to you. Since our infrastructure is gone and we have so much work to do to get re-settled, our support program will not be what we want it to be for a while.
Thank you all for your good wishes, donations, supportive calls and emails. We really do feel your love and prayers and know that God will come through for CARES and the rest of the CAH community. When God closes a door, he opens a window. We will make it through.
