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THE STORY OF THE DEPOSITORY TRUST & CLEARING CORPORATION
to recover the certificates. We knew nothing about this, but we became experts in about two weeks.” Experts, maybe, but the recovery work was still arduous. Femia’s team from Operations, along with Audit and Compliance staff, teamed with the restoration specialists and went down to the vault each day in hazmat suits and masks to carry out the delicate process of carefully picking every single piece of paper up off the floor. “We began putting these documents into bags, and bags were placed into boxes,” Femia said. “We had somewhere around 5,000 boxes. They were palleted and shrink-wrapped. We built a ramp through the broken wall into the parking lot and began trekking these boxes up to the street level, where the police department had closed off a section of the street for us.” The boxes were shipped to Fort Worth, Texas, in seven refrigerator trucks and placed in vacuum-sealed steel storage containers under intense pressure and heat. The frozen documents were freeze-dried, a sublimation
The DTCC team and audit staff (below and inset) went down to the vault each day in hazmat suits and masks and very delicately sifted through
every single document damaged by Hurricane
Sandy’s storm surge. Once separated, the waterlogged documents were put into bags and the bags were boxed. Eventually, 5,000 boxes were shipped cross-country to Fort Worth, Texas, where the drying process would take several months due to the sheer number of damaged
documents. In all, 99.5 percent of the water-damaged assets were recovered.
process that converts ice to vapor that bypasses the typical liquid state. The process took several months because the storage containers could not accommodate the sheer volume of boxes that were frozen. Once it was confirmed that the documents inside the storage containers were dry, they were
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