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Natural Disasters

Winds of Change: HCF Staff Responds to Hurricane Katrina

On Aug. 29, 2005, the City of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were ravaged by one of the most destructive natural disasters in our nation's history – Hurricane Katrina. Historic Charleston Foundation staff quickly gathered to respond to the disaster, offering assistance to Patricia Gay, Executive Director of the Preservation Resource Center in New Orleans, staying in touch by cell phone as Patty toured the streets of her city's historic districts by boat. HCF staff immediately forwarded Patty a list of recommendations that had been developed here after Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

Shortly thereafter, HCF's Executive Director, Kitty Robinson, published a nationally read editorial column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, calling for protection of the architecture and culture that made New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region a national historic treasure. In the article, Mrs. Robinson called for government officials and citizen advocates to protect their historic resources from even further destruction by big developers as they began the redevelopment process.

Staff also contacted officials with the National Trust for Historic Preservation to offer assistance. As a result, three HCF staff members – Katherine Saunders, Leigh Handal and Jill Koverman – loaded up a van and headed to New Orleans in mid-October. The three joined two of Jill's professional associates – Michelle Baker of The S.C. State Museum and Karen Nickless of the Edisto Island Historic Preservation Society – to become the first NTHP volunteer response team to visit the city.

After a crash course in mold remediation, the five set out, going work door-to-door in some of New Orleans' hardest hit neighborhoods, including Broadmoor, Lakeview, and Holy Cross in the hard-hit Ninth Ward section of the city. They greeted returning residents and provided them with cleaning supplies, tarps and information about repairing water damage and mold. The week culminated in a workshop, quickly developed by the team and sponsored by the Preservation Resource Center, that helped residents better understand their options regarding the preservation of their houses and neighborhoods.

According to an article published the next day in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the workshop gave some local residents one of their earliest signs of hope. "In my mind, we were never going to bounce back," said Amy Wilson, a resident of the Bywater neighborhood who lost her roof to the storm. However, she said, she had visited Charleston since Hurricane Hugo and found the city looked better than ever. "If Charleston can do it, so can New Orleans," she told the Times Picayune reporter.

Several months later, HCF preservation staff Jonathan Poston and Kris King joined several others to visit the city and make recommendations on which historic structures were salvageable. Two hundred of the city's most heavily damaged structures within the National Register historic districts had been "red tagged," i.e., targeted for immediate demolition as public health and safety threats. Charleston preservationists inspected and photographed as many of those historic buildings as they could prior to demolition.