Artifacts of Disaster: Creating the Smithsonian's Katrina Collection

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 began gathering 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 that might address 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 reason for 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; handmade "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 1,731 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 (http:// 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...