Hurricane a capricious visitor to cultural sites

updated 4:40 p.m. ET Sept. 7, 2005

As it ripped through Mississippi’s coast and submerged New Orleans in a toxic stew, Hurricane Katrina laid waste to some of the region’s cultural institutions but spared others with slight or moderate damage.

From Mobile, Ala., where the retired World War II battleship USS Alabama was listing eight degrees at its pier and its memorial park closed indefinitely, to Baton Rouge, La., where the zoo lost some of its trees but none of its animals, the storm wreaked capricious damage on historical sites, science centers, art museums and botanical gardens.

“We’re learning now that the destruction was even greater than we thought,” Ed Able, president of the American Association of Museums in Washington, D.C., said Wednesday. “What we need most now is skeleton staffs to protect these collections — not just in New Orleans but all along the Gulf Coast.”

He said that state officials were to meet Wednesday in Baton Rouge to discuss museum security. “We can’t just lock the doors of the museums and walk away,” Able said. The region includes 126 historical and cultural sites, “literally from A to Z — aquariums to zoos.”

Some stayed to protect art
New Orleans especially is noted for its gardens and more than 40 museums. But with most telephones out of service, it has been difficult to contact many of them for damage reports, Able said. At most institutions, phones rang busy and e-mails were not answered.

Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP Charles Gray, president of the Hancock County Historical Society, who turned his home into a museum, looks for artifacts in the debris of his house.

At the New Orleans Museum of Art, which has one of the country’s largest glass collections, a 45-foot metal sculpture, “Virlane Tower,” by Kenneth Snelson and valued at $500,000, was “reduced to a twisted mess in the lagoon,” AAM reported.

Snelson said Wednesday in an e-mail to The Associated Press that another of his works, an eight-foot tower at the World Trade Center, was destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. “I can’t wait to see what happens next time because I’m running out of towers,” he said.

Other outdoor sculptures at NOMA were moved indoors before the storm hit by museum employees who then stayed to protect the art collection, despite being urged to leave by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Able said one report he received described the museum as surrounded by water, “looking like a castle on a hill with a moat around it.”

Relying on press reports and information from Web sites and other sources, the AAM has posted a list of storm-impacted sites extending as far north as Jackson, Miss., where the Old Capitol Museum of Mississippi History lost part of its roof and art and natural science museums suffered damage from leaks.

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