Restoration One Year After Katrina
The World Monuments Fund and the Preservation Trades Network give hope to residents of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans
Aug 21, 2006
With the initiative to Restore a Sense of Place, the New York based World Monuments Fund and the New Hampshire based Preservation Trades Network, organized a series of demonstration and restoration projects that started in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi and will culminate in October in New Orleans, Louisiana.
To date, the WMF has raised close to $330,000 towards specialized projects on the Gulf Coast. Considering the epic scale of destruction one year ago, it is a small drop in the bucket and makes creative and strategic planning all the more necessary. PTN provided experienced trades people, who practice traditional methods of construction as well as preservation. Each demonstration restoration project is accompanied by workshops that give residents skills that are meaningful to them in their own repairs. A mobile preservation unit is also available for people to book appointments for consultations.
"Two Waves of Destruction"
Morris Hylton III, the Initiatives Manager for WMF, explained, "Right after the storm there was a real need to advocate that people pause before they begin to demolish, or finish demolishing structures and send everything to the landfill. There was a real need to advocate salvaging as much of the historic fabric as possible to reuse in other projects." Used as a rallying point in the community, WMF estimates they salvaged 80 to 85 percent of the materials that were able to be identified in Bay St. Louis; windows, doors and property were all scattered over a large area. The materials were then documented, tagged, put in a storage container and donated to the Hancock County Historical Society in Mississippi. Lisa Sasser, President of PTN, described "two waves of destruction": first the hurricane itself, and then the team of well-intended volunteers from all over the country who took part in a gutting campaign.
The volunteers did not have the proper guidance or access to information and removed historic plaster, cyprus doors and windows, fireplace surroundings and details that did not need to be removed. There was a tremendous amount of misinformation; in some cases sustainable slate roofs were removed because volunteers were under the impression they were dealing with asbestos.
The old-growth wood indigenous to the area, such as cyprus and southern yellow pine, and high-lime content historic plaster are significantly more resistant to rot and termites than modern construction materials. Many 20th-century neighborhoods in New Orleans were built with white and red oak that is very susceptible to rot. And modern drywall used in recent modifications to houses could not survive after a flood. The old structures were better ventilated and designed for periodic flooding, and so survived while newer structures lost their foundations. To restore historic plaster, one only needed to clean and properly ventilate it by removing the baseboards. Once dried out, the material is sound. Workers ran into problems where historic plaster was covered over with newer plaster or removed and replaced with drywall, which completely failed when exposed to water.
