Artifacts of Disaster

The idea of museum collections built from disasters, natural or man-made, can be unsettling. Yet collections are the basis of everything that history museums do. This explains why in the weeks after 9/11 the Smithsonian Institution gathered artifacts from the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the field in Pennsylvania where Flight 93 crashed to earth in an effort to capture something of the material record of what happened that day. And it explains why shortly after Katrina collided with the Gulf Coast the curatorial staff of the National Museum of American History met to consider the problem of collecting artifacts to support future museum exhibitions, public programs, websites, and publications concerning this exceptional hurricane and its aftermath.

Photographer Hugh Talman and I were among the Smithsonian staff who had gone to New York City four years earlier, and with that experience under our belts we left for the Gulf Coast in late September 2005 on the first of two collecting and documentation trips, each lasting a week. Through a friend I made contact with the police chief of Houma, thirty miles southwest of New Orleans, who found us rooms in a hotel full of reporters, emergency responders, and evacuees. We faced a gauntlet of security checkpoints, exclusion zones, and flooded streets, but the chief also assigned us a patrol officer and a squad car, in a kind of ratification of our purpose in being there.

What to do, where to go, who to see, how to begin? Parts of three states had been devastated. We had made a list of “ghost artifacts” before we departed, things we thought belonged in an ideal material record of the storm: an axe used to chop through an attic roof; Michael Brown’s FEMA identity card; hand-made “Help!” signs and flotation devices; part of a levee; Coast Guard rescue gear; a “dropwindsonde,” the sacrificial electronic dipstick ejected by hurricane-hunter aircraft to chart wind speed, air pressure, and other storm conditions. It was an unrealizable ideal, of course, but it provided us with initial direction and gave us a basis for establishing official contacts who helped us gain access to key areas. Otherwise, we kept ourselves open to serendipity.

During those two trips in late September and early December we covered hundreds of miles of Louisiana and Mississippi in police and rental cars. The fruits of our labors: fifty-eight artifacts and 1,938 digital photographs. Each item is thoroughly documented, embedded in a context by means of literature, photography, notes, and maps to make it as adaptable as possible to future museum uses. The Worldwide Web provides a new outlet for documentation normally stashed in museum vertical files, and many of the photos are online in the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (www.hurricanearchive.org/index.php), a project of George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media and the University of New Orleans in partnership with the National Museum of American History.{1}

There can of course be no definitive collection of any event, certainly not one as massive and complex as Katrina. Time will determine the usefulness of the Smithsonian’s Hurricane Katrina collection. Some of these objects and images may serve as anchors for the thematic storytelling that museums of history have come to love. In the meantime, here, under five headings, is a sampling.

Levees

Had its levee walls not failed, New Orleans would have been left merely wet and windswept, not submerged and depopulated. Acquiring a piece of wreckage from a New Orleans levee—not necessarily to reveal a design flaw or show how the walls failed, but something of manageable size that said “levee”—was therefore a priority. We clambered over muddy, patched levees along the 17th Street Canal, the London Avenue Canal, and the Industrial Canal in our search. The tongue-and-groove sheet-steel pilings driven down along the canals’ flanks drew our interest, but a flame-cut piece of steel piling or an ice cream scoop of the soft peaty soil beneath them did not say “levee” to us.

Along Mirabeau Street, at the spot in the London Avenue Canal where two breaks had flooded the Gentilly district, we spied a gap in the foot-thick, eight-foot-tall concrete flood wall that topped the levee. Long sections of these walls, completed only in 2004, had collapsed under the weight of the storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain. Someone had jackhammered open this gap to give access to the canal side, and the wall lay in chunks at our feet. I selected three hefty pieces that showed the decorative cast ribbing that had faced the homes (fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Sections of the concrete flood wall that topped the London Avenue Canal along Mirabeau Street. (Photo by Hugh Talman, National Museum of American History.)

At the 17th Street Canal near Robert E. Lee Boulevard we came across an 18-inch Fisher-Price toy castle half-buried in the mud of what had been someone’s backyard (fig. 2). One’s home is one’s castle, goes the saying—an idea that carries an association with permanence and durability. But the home that stood in front of this yard had been swept away by water pouring through a 645-foot-long break in the levee. The mud-caked toy spoke to us of shattered illusions. We did not overlook the fact that a castle is the emblem of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Fig. 2 Toy castle in a backyard near Robert E. Lee Boulevard and the 17th Street Canal. (Photo by Hugh Talman, National Museum of American History.)

Flood

One can read the greasy, multicolored water marks on buildings in New Orleans like rock strata. A thick, dark line shows where the water level stabilized for the longest period, when the city had become a part of Lake Pontchartrain. Thinner lines below indicate the stages by which the water fell after the breaches were sandbagged and the straw pumps came on line to force the water out of the city through steel pipe laid across the levees.

We sought to acquire some objects that preserved that record of the flood’s course, specifically items whose typical placement would be familiar enough that simply looking at them later would convey a sense of how high the waters had reached. We came away with three, each from a different district of the New Orleans: an exit sign from a parking lot, a fast-food drive-through menu board, and a pair of lace curtains (fig. 3). These artifacts have what might be called a forensic historical interest: they retain not only the marks left by the receding floodwaters but also traces of the chemical stew those waters contained. Who knows what purpose that may serve in the dim future?

Fig. 3 Wall and curtained window of a New Orleans house, showing the traces left by floodwaters. (Photo by Hugh Talman, National Museum of American History.)

New Orleans did not rely only on levees and flood walls for flood protection. The city installed a set of massive Albert B. Wood screw pumps in 1915 and 1929 near the canals and the lake. They range from twelve to fourteen feet in diameter and have an average capacity of 250,000 gallons per minute or 400 million gallons a day against a seven-foot lift. The Wood pumps lost their battle with Katrina when the levees failed, submerging the pump houses. But once access and power were restored they outperformed the Corps of Engineers’ straw pumps, according to officials with the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans. Our repeated attempts to enter one of the Wood pumping stations were rebuffed for lack of sufficient official approvals and unspecified homeland security issues.

Response

Disaster can bring out the best in people, and the worst. In the weeks following Katrina the news media reported some of the worst: looting, sniping at rescuers, the closure of the bridge at Gretna that trapped some people in New Orleans, the ineffectual emergency response agencies, police misconduct. But there were also acts of bravery and integrity and kindness. We were seeking artifacts that could tell stories of such individual acts as well as of broader institutional issues. And as with the levees, we had to find tangible objects that expressed an intangible reality—that somehow said “response.”

Fig. 4 New Orleans Police Department SWAT team with the vest one of them was wearing when he rescued a five-day-old baby from floodwaters near a housing project. (Photo by Hugh Talman, National Museum of American History.)

Thousands of New Orleanians were plucked from rooftops and floodwaters by search-and-rescue teams. From a New Orleans Police Department SWAT team member we acquired the bulletproof vest he was wearing when he dove into eight-foot-deep floodwaters to rescue a five-day-old girl outside a housing project (fig. 4). Another officer gave us the black NOPD shirt he was wearing as he administered CPR to that same baby after she was lifted up into their boat, while the girl’s family and other police officers continued to fight for survival in the polluted water. From the U.S. Coast Guard we acquired a Katrina-tested rescue basket and a quick-strop—the harness used to winch someone up on a wire rope into a helicopter. The basket and strop belong to an ideal class of museum artifact: manageable size, prominent role, durable construction, rich with stories (fig. 5).

Fig. 5 U.S. Coast Guard personnel at the New Orleans Air Station demonstrating the use of a quick-strop used Katrina helicopter rescue operations. (Photo by Hugh Talman, National Museum of American History.)

From the Lower Ninth Ward we collected a pair of objects that evoked the flood and the National Guard’s subsequent movement through the area: a mailbox from in front of a concrete stoop on Lizardi Street where the house had been carried away (fig. 6) and a storm window spray-painted with the large orange X seen on almost every structure and vehicle in the city. The four quadrants of these ubiquitous tags recorded the date the structure had been searched (top), the number of dead found inside (bottom), the number rescued (right), and the unit that performed the search (left).

Fig. 6 The house that sat on this lot on Lizardi Street in New OrleansÕ Ninth Ward was swept away by flooding. The mailbox is now in the SmithsonianÕs Katrina collection. (Photo by Hugh Talman, National Museum of American History.)

The rescue of the pets of New Orleans is a remarkable chapter in the history of Americans’ love affair with animals. Skilled personnel equipped with specialized vehicles, traps, and capture poles entered the flooded areas as the waters receded. We visited the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center in Gonzales, Louisiana, which had been converted into a kind of Noah’s Ark; thousands of dogs, cats, horses, ferrets, lizards, snakes, and aquarium fish were quartered there under the temporary care of the U.S. Humane Society. We collected the leather harness of a rescued horse and the catch pole, muddy boots, cap, and badge of an animal rescuer who spent weeks recovering starving, fearful dogs and cats from inside moldy homes in the abandoned districts of New Orleans.

No collection of artifacts related to the response to Katrina could be complete without something from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Our efforts to acquire one of the two-thousand-dollar credit cards the agency issued to survivors went nowhere. We settled for a T-shirt emblazoned with the acronym FEMA—the type of shirt disaster relief workers were instructed not to wear in late 2005 because of the violent reaction those letters provoked in some quarters.

People

One of our central concerns was to register the impact of Katrina on the lives of ordinary people. Other organizations would compile statistics on the number of homes and businesses lost; we hoped to return with reminders of individual experience, artifacts layered with meanings approachable from a variety of perspectives.

Fig. 7 Plasterer Jayce Porée holding a hand-made sweep that is now part of the SmithsonianÕs Katrina collection. (Photo by Hugh Talman, National Museum of American History.)

The hand-made sweep we acquired from third-generation Creole plasterer Jayce Porée in New Orleans’s Eighth Ward is just such an object (fig. 7). Porée used it to pull decorative plaster picture rail for the stately homes of old New Orleans. His shop had been underwater, but his sweeps were hanging on a rack just above the high-water mark.

In Biloxi, Mississippi, where the storm surge flung casino barges about like toys, we retrieved a casino employee’s “Cruisin’ the Coast” uniform jacket caught in a tangle of fencing and oak branches. In Waveland, Mississippi, in a vacant lot between shattered houses, we found a kitchen wall clock (fig. 8) stopped at 9:27; the eye of the storm passed over Waveland at around 10:00 a.m. And in Slidell, Louisiana, which lay in Katrina’s path, we collected a painted cardboard sign stuck in front of a field of debris that had been a subdivision. The sign displayed a solidarity with fellow victims of disaster: “God bless you St. Bernard, the hearts of Slidell are with you.”

Fig. 8 Kitchen wall clock, Waveland, Mississippi. The clock is stopped at 9:27; the eye of the Katrina made landfall at 10:00 a.m. (Photo by Hugh Talman, National Museum of American History.)

Recovery

We acquired machine-printed signs from the more affluent neighborhoods of New Orleans, advertising adveritising lawyers, contractors, flood damage repair, and mold removal in an effervescent, oddly reassuring demonstration of American entrepreneurialism. Then there was this sign: “Justice after Katrina / The people must decide! / NOTHING ABOUT US / WITHOUT US / IS FOR US / Gulf Coast Survivors Assembly / March for Human Rights & / Right to Return / New Orleans, LA Sat., December 10th.”

Fig. 9 Jillian Gross, Habitat for Humanity crew chief, completing work on the last of fifty-one houses that Habitat built on the National Mall to be shipped to the Gulf. (Photo by Hugh Talman, National Museum of American History.)

Hundreds of miles away, new homes of many sorts—trailers, tents, prefabricated houses—were being prepared for the Gulf Coast. On the National Mall in Washington, D.C., volunteer Habitat for Humanity crews framed fifty-one houses to be shipped to the Gulf. We interviewed Jillian Gross, a Habitat crew chief, and departed with the tool belt she wore while helping build the fifty-first house (fig. 9).

Back along the Gulf, undocumented immigrant day laborers flocked to the region in search of work. In downtown New Orleans we met a man from Mexico wearing a heavily decorated leather back-support belt (fig 10). He was surprised that we were interested not in hiring him but in his belt, an emblem of the backbreaking task of repairing the damage to the region. In the end his belt, too, became ours.

Fig. 10 Mexican day laborer in downtown New Orleans. (Photo by Hugh Talman, National Museum of American History.)

Misfortune calls forth ingenuity. One of the more pervasive signs of the federal government presence in the area were the sealed beige plastic bags of MREs (meals, ready-to-eat)—self-heating military provisions that served as emergency rations. New Orleans artist Heather Macfarlane did a brisk business selling purses made from MRE bags. The handles are insulated electrical cord she scavenged from the great piles of debris that lined the city’s streets. She donated four to our collection, including chicken and rice, cheese tortellini, and Cajun beans, rice, and sausage (fig. 11).

Fig. 11 Purses made by New Orleans artist Heather Macfarlane from MRE bags and electrical wire scavenged from the wreckage of the city. (Photo by Hugh Talman, National Museum of American History.)

In many a museum artifact, intrinsic values—what one sees by looking at an object—yield to extrinsic values—what one learns about its history of ownership and usage. Both are valid; the extrinsic is the more elusive. A microscope gives up the principles of its operation much more readily that its work history. The pumps and motors of an automatic dishwasher, the racks, the cycles and dials, the soap, the cabinetry—each tells a story of incremental change in response to varying aesthetic, economic, consumer-preference factors. But a dishwasher found upended and smashed in a wave-rocked home in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward may have been a gift to a newly married couple from the bride’s repairman uncle. That fact endows the object with a new set of meanings having less to do with technology than with a life story.

Ultimately it was in pursuit of such meanings that we traveled to the Gulf Coast. Collecting museum artifacts is a specialized sort of occupation, with acknowledged standards of care and documentation. But the authenticity (a freighted word in museum practice) of a museum artifact has to do not only with objective physicality but also, in some sense, with truth—which, in the end, is what we hope we brought back from the Gulf Coast.

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{1}The National Museum of American History also partnered with the Center for History and New Media to create the 9/11 digital archive, http://911digitalarchive.org/.