University leaders announced that recovery operations have yielded remarkably successful results two months after a lightning fire heavily damaged the University of South Florida St. Petersburg’s College of Marine Science in May.

St. Petersburg Campus Recovery

Emergency teams successfully extracted more than 30 freezers, crates, bins and boxes from the building, preserving vital global specimens, including water samples, biological fish tissues, soil samples and plants.

Technicians also successfully retrieved the vast majority of scientific data housed on the facility’s main computer servers, preventing the permanent loss of years of intricate scientific research and analysis.

Future Facility Planning

University officials say planning and construction of a new facility would likely take more than a year, but they weren’t ready to put a timeframe on this kind of project.

University leaders are shifting their attention toward replacing the ruined building with a highly modernized laboratory hub, with the goal of building a state-of-the-art facility that is commensurate with their world-class scientific work.

Original reporting: Tampa Bay Florida News (HLL/CB) — read the source article.