A German municipal archives was flooded with up to 10,000 litres of water today, with officials blaming the disaster on a woman who pressed the wrong button on a control panel, according to dpa. The city of Dusseldorf said 150 metres of shelving was flooded when the water from a theatre sprinkler system cascaded down into a basement where 19th-century city council documents and street directories were kept. The accident happened the day the archives were to be ceremonially opened in their new basement home after being moved in from other sites. The ceremony was cancelled. Officials said a staffer had meant to switch the sprinkler system from "automatic" to "manual" but pressed the wrong button, setting off an unstoppable spray of water. They said the soggy papers would be restored using freeze-dryer machinery that was used to restore part of the City of Cologne's archives 16 months ago. Nearby Cologne's archives fell down a sinkhole in one of Germany's worst archive losses ever.
