The Condition of the ABS scroll

 

Conservator Clare Manias examined the ABS scroll at some undetermined time and made several observations about its condition, as well as taking some of the only images available of this scroll.  Here is the part where she discusses the scroll's physical condition:

The Torah scroll displays clear signs of water damage and subsequent repairs.[13] The fact that the scroll is incomplete is likely due to the flood; the missing skins were either lost or too damaged to attempt to repair. Text has been traced over in areas where the calligraphy was washed out during flooding. Several newly prepared panels were sewn in to restore areas damaged during the flooding. Thus, the majority of this scroll is made up of “older” stained and grey-ish skins which survived the flood. These skins date anywhere from the twelfth to fifteenth-century and are written in a Persian or Yemenite Hebrew calligraphic script.[14] The “newer” skins appear as patched-in columns. The newer skins are clean and white and written in the same Chinese Hebrew calligraphic style seen in the other post-flood rewritten Torah scrolls.[15]

She provides this image, to show, perhaps, were text has been "traced over" where the calligraphy was water damaged:

Is this an example of such tracing, from the forty-eights column of the ABS scroll:

There seems to be a newer section  of text, and above it, a section very much water damaged.

Pollak thought this scroll was never in use, that it was a genizah copy.  If that is the case, why were any of the letters that have been traced after the flood, let alone  "“newer” skins [that] appear as patched-in columns."  Why go through the effort to make this scroll legible if the Kaifeng community never intended to use it?  I think Pollack is correct in thinking this is not the Scroll of Moses.  But I am not convinced that this was a geniza copy.  I am reading the ABS scroll, and it a complex and frustration text that does not easily reveal its secrets.