With yesterday afternoon free, a small group of us ventured to the Louisiana State Museum (Presbytere) to visit the exhibit "Living with hurricanes: Katrina and beyond." After spending the week contemplating the impact of the storm nine years ago, listening to stories about community and cultural rejuvenation, and observing both progress and dormancy it was sobering to experience this exhibit. One room was a hodgepodge of oral histories, covering everything from everyday heroes in the community, to search and rescue teams, experiences at the Superdome, and stories about futile attempts at evacuation. Another covered the engineering of the levee system and my camera cannot do justice to the wall-sized computer graphic of the map of New Orleans that showed a timed progression of the levees breaking and subsequent flooding across the area.
I learned about the "Dutch Dialogues," a collaboration between Dutch urban planners/designers, engineers, landscape architects and hydrology experts and their Louisiana counterparts around the idea of "living with water" in a planful way. If you are interested, visit this website: http://dutchdialogues.com
The images I'll share remind me of both the devastation (some that is still present) and the rebirth of a great city, one that gets serious when it needs to, but also knows how to NOT take itself too seriously...
This is the side of a house, marked by FEMA after searching the interior. It indicates the state of the "hazards" inside and if anyone (or any pet - seen here) was found alive or dead. Several uninhabited structures throughout the city still bear these marks.
These are costumes made out of the blue tarps that covered the roofs of the city after Katrina. Initially designed for a fundraiser, the "Blue Tarp Costume Fashion Show" held in January, 2006 - these were later donned at Mardis Gras.
No comments:
Post a Comment