RESPONDING TO DISASTERS

Gulf Islands National Seashore visitor center. Gulf Islands National Seashore visitor center. Rusted cannon tubes at Jamestown.

When Hurricane Isabel flooded Jamestown in 2003, threatening its precious artifacts, the National Park Service was unprepared to deal with the magnitude of the damage. The park service learned some hard lessons, one of which was that they needed an emergency-response team trained to preserve museum collections and archaeological resources. By Paula Neely

On September 18, 2003, when Hurricane Isabel roared through Virginia, archaeologist bill Kelso watched as water began seeping under the door of the cottage on Jamestown Island, where he and his wife were staying. established in 1607, Jamestown was the first permanent english settlement and is now one of the premiere archaeological sites in north America. As the water rose, Kelso decided to see if he could get to the office building across the street where artifacts from the excavation of the James Fort site were housed in a hurricane-proof vault. He knew they would be safer there, but the water in the road was up to his shoulders, so he turned back.

Just then, a burst of wind flattened the crepe myrtle trees beside the cottage. “I thought, ‘Whoa!’ there were miniature american archaeology

Rusted metal objects taken from Fort Pickens.

Sara Wolf (center) and Bob Sonderman (in the dark shirt) are two members of the original MERT formed to deal with the types of disasters seen in the photographs above.

tornadoes and trees crashing and booming all around. It was like a war zone,” he said. back inside the cottage, he moved his valuables to the second floor loft and waited for the storm to pass. the worst of it hit that night during high tide, creating a nine-foot storm surge that covered the cottage floor with five inches of water. by morning, the water had receded enough that he could walk around the island. Hundreds of trees were down and two bridges had been dislodged from their footings. electrical power was out and would remain so for the next two weeks. the fort excavation site, which is owned by ApVA preservation Virginia, a private, nonprofit organization, was covered by tarps and was largely unscathed. the Visitor Center, where the national park Service’s (npS) Jamestown artifact collection was housed, was a different story. (Jamestown is part of Colonial national Historical park, and the npS and ApVA preservation Virginia manage the island in partnership.) Doors and a window were broken, and the basement was flooded with five feet of water. “the furniture was upside down and water was still up to the window level, trapped inside,” Kelso, the director of archaeology for ApVA preservation Virginia, said. “booklets were drifting around…. I saw a notebook in the debris around the building. It was J.C. Harrington’s field notes from the 1930s. I knew then that the archives had been hit.” He sighed, “We had offered to let (npS) store things in our vault, but the head Jamestown ranger said it has never flooded enough to damage our records.”

Anticipating that the storm might blow out the windows on the main floor exhibit area, the park’s staff had moved some objects and a collection of paintings to the basement, where over a million 17th–and 18th–century artifacts, including pottery, arms and armor, tools, and glass, as well as archival documents and photos, were stored. they also sandbagged the doors and set up pumps, in accordance with their emergency response plan.

Almost everything was soaked by brackish seawater. Shocked by the damage, the park’s officials contacted the npS’ regional office in boston for assistance. Sara Wolf, director of the npS northeast museum Services Center, began recruiting experts to deal with the flooding. Wolf also requested assistance from pam West, director of the npS museum resource Center in maryland, who dispatched archaeologists Karen Orrence and robert Sonderman to Jamestown. Wolf and West also rushed to the site. most of them had not been trained to respond to a hurricane or other natural disaster. they arrived a day and a half after the storm, accompanied by other npS archivists and curators. the park staff was overwhelmed and asked the npS professionals to take over. “that’s the dynamic I see every time I go out,” Sonderman said, explaining that the local staff usually isn’t trained to handle emergencies of this nature.

On Wolf’s recommendation, the park hired a professional storm recovery team that started blowing hot air through the building to help dry it out and keep mold from forming. npS and ApVA teams moved the artifacts out of the visitor center and washed and dried them. the storage cabinets were difficult to drain and water had been trapped inside the drawers for at least a day and a half. rust was forming on iron objects and mended ceramics were coming apart.

When cabinets were submerged by the Jamestown flood, the trays of artifacts they contained were mixed up and some provenience information was lost. The cabinets, which cost thousands of dollars, also had to be replaced.

“It was so sad, and it seemed like an insurmountable task,” said bly Straube, senior curator for ApVA preservation Virginia. She and others tried to save the notes that were floating in the water inside the cabinet drawers. Original documents and archaeological field notes were rinsed in distilled water to clean them and then packed wet in bins to be frozen for later freeze-drying, the standard procedure for stabilizing soaked paper. Sonderman remembered seeing John Cotter’s and ed Jelk’s field notes from the 1950s afloat: “that got to me. they were my mentors.” three days after the storm the npS emergency response unit, known as the Incident management team (Imt), arrived. (the park service established the Imt in the 1970s to deal with wildfires on npS lands.) they had been in the area for several days clearing fallen trees from another npS property, and they were unaware of the efforts underway to save the collections. preserving the cultural resources was not one of their priorities, Sonderman explained. the Imt commander took control of the recovery efforts, assigning Wolf to handle the collections. the commander also ordered engineers, architects, and a public health officer to examine the visitor center, which they condemned. “We freaked out,” Sonderman said. “If they closed the building, the iron objects would completely rust out and the ceramics would exfoliate.” Luckily, the commander understood the gravity of the situation and gave them resources, funding, and three more days to move the collections to another location. to make matters worse, they had to race against another hurricane that was bearing down on Virginia.

In order to save the collection, Wolf decided to move all 270 cabinets, with artifacts still inside them, out of the basement. Holes were drilled in the sides of the cabinets to help drain the water, drawers were shimmed and each cabinet was shrink-wrapped in plastic to keep the contents intact. the team tore down walls so as to move freely from room to room, and they jacked the cabinets onto pallets, and removed them with a forklift. the collections were then taken to an empty, World War II-era warehouse about 40 miles away at Fort Lee in petersburg just before the next storm hit.

Wolf, who is a conservator, was conscripted to manage the triage effort there for the next three months. She and West supervised five teams of 20 npS conservators, recruited from parks around the country, who worked 12-hour shifts for 14-day periods to stabilize the material. “It was an incredibly emotional event because no one had ever seen a disaster of this size,” said Wolf. though the local press were very critical of the park’s response to the disaster, those same critics were impressed by the npS’ conservation work, she said.

When preliminary salvage of the collections was completed, they were moved again to a warehouse in newport news with better climate control, where long-term stabilization work began. Some artifacts, such as glass and wooden

A shrink-wrapped cabinet from the Jamestown visitor center is hauled away by a forklift. Workers tore down a door and part of a wall so the forklift could reach the cabinets.

objects, were sent to various experts who specialize in those media. most of the artifacts are now located in a new $4 million storage facility at Historic Jamestowne that was built 10 1/2 feet above the flood plain. the visitor center was demolished and replaced with a new building that is also on higher ground. “Overall, the collection came through beautifully,” Wolf said. “We retrieved 99.5 percent of it.” the biggest loss was the photo collection, but they were able to freeze the photos (freezing stops the deterioration) and save the images in digital format. Some ceramics have been re-mended; others will need to be mended over time. She estimated that the four-year effort cost the federal government about $6 million plus the initial recovery costs.

“We still have a solid archival collection,” said Karen rehm, npS Chief Jamestown Historian, adding that they’ve “learned a lot about how to store things properly.” She noted, however, that the provenience organization is not as good as it was.

Creating the Museum Emergency-Response Team

ISAbeLWASAWAKe-Up CALL. nothing like that had ever happened before, but given the increasing frequency and severity of hurricanes and the location of numerous npS historical sites on the east Coast, West, Wolf, and Sonderman wanted to be better prepared for the next time. In collaboration with their colleagues, they organized a museum emergency response team (mert) trained to deal with similar incidents involving npS archaeological sites, artifact collections, historical buildings, cemeteries, and other cultural resources. they began by assembling a team of on-call npS experts including curators, conservators, archaeologists, and collection managers. they also recruited architects and used safety officers to advise the team about whether or not a building would be safe to enter and how to tear down doors and walls, if necessary. maintenance people were added to help remove water, dry out buildings, clear debris, and move furniture. there are now two merts, each with about 20 members, directed by West and Wolf. each member was issued a “ready bag” packed with tools, masks, earplugs, gloves, safety boots, and other emergency supplies. West said they conducted exercises involving mock incidents “to stretch people and see how they would react.” the merts were subsumed by the Imt, and in order to deploy they had to be called to a disaster by the Imt commander. there are now four Imts—national, eastern, Central, and pacific—that respond to all natural disasters. their top priorities are maintaining health and safety and restoring the infrastructure. the Imt commander assumes authority over local park officials for the duration of the disaster. this enables the Imt to do whatever is necessary to get the park operating again.

Initially, getting the Imt commanders to call mert in a timely manner was a challenge. “the first 24 to 48 hours are critical because mold starts growing and chances are we’ll start losing things. Documents need to be frozen to halt the damage or they can be gone within 12 hours or so,” Sonderman said. the commanders have since come to realize that the cultural resources require immediate attention. “they get it now,” Wolf said.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case in 2004, when Hurricane Ivan hit the Gulf Island national Seashore park in pensacola, Florida. two weeks passed before the Imt commander asked West to send a team to Fort pickens, a 19thcentury fort built to defend pensacola bay. the storm surge

Members of the original MERT are seen in this 2004 photograph. Some of these people have since quit the team because of the physical demands and stress of the work.

had moved the visitor center off its foundation and split it in two, flooding the Civil War exhibit, the natural history collection, and archival documents. Another facility that housed a modular building with more artifacts from various periods also flooded.

West gathered a team that included conservators, an architect, and an archivist knowledgeable about conserving paper documents. they flew in and took a boat across the bay to the fort. “the road was washed out, so we had to do everything by boat,” she explained. that took too much time, so the team decided to camp on the island. For the next three weeks, they took cold showers while they salvaged the museum’s exhibits, saving the majority of the collections.

“the exhibit was ripped apart, slides were everywhere, and there was flash rusting on the metals,” West said. Civil War uniforms were moldy and cabinets were filled with artifacts soaked in water. everything lay in the muck until they arrived. “It was déjà vu all over again,” Sonderman said, referring to Jamestown.

Using their Jamestown experience, they set up a triage with help from the local park staff. Documents and photos were stored in freezer chests and later freeze-dried and scanned. needing help, West called in a hotshot crew—an elite firefighting team—that received on-site training in collections stabilization. they couldn’t remove historical ordnance and cabinets of artifacts stored inside an 1880s structure because the door was too small for their equipment, so, having consulted an architect, they leveled a wall that was not part of the original structure. they were nearly finished when another hurricane,

Coping with Wildfires

Firefighters battle the Long Mesa Fire at Mesa Verde in 2002. The firefighters protected the park’s curatorial facility and office buildings that were threatened by the flames.

Each year, Julie Bell, an archaeologist at Mesa Verde National Park, takes a refresher course in firefighting and hikes three miles with a 45-pound backpack in less than 46 minutes to renew her certification.

Bell is one of the first firefighters on the scene when a large fire breaks out, as is the case with many archaeologists in Western states. She helps to determine where to dig the fire line and directs crews during suppression activities so that, if possible, archaeological sites can be saved. Since 1996, five large wildfires have burned over half of Mesa Verde’s 52,000 acres. Incident Command Teams are only deployed in the event of large, dangerous fires, and when they’ve been summoned to Mesa Verde, they’ve utilized Bell as a cultural resource advisor.

“The biggest problem for archaeological sites is runoff,” Bell said. She and her team treat the watershed above the sites, reseed, and put down matting made from aspen shavings that are sometimes impregnated with native seeds to slow the erosion that can carry away soil and artifacts.

Rock art can also be damaged by spalling. For example, during the 1996 fire, the heat dried out the stone containing the petroglyph panel known as the Battleship Rock Panel. During the next freeze and thaw, the rock exfoliated and many of the petroglyphs popped off. “It’s like someone took a shotgun to it,” she said.

Although they were catastrophic, the Mesa Verde fires revealed 676 previously unknown archaeological sites. After the 1996 fire, archaeologists discovered a string of about 100 check dams and long walls used to capture water, indicating that agricultural techniques were more advanced than previously thought. —Paula Neely

When Hurricane Katrina struck West Ship Island, Fort Massachusetts, shown here, was inundated by a 30-foot storm surge. The aftermath of the flooding is seen is this photo.

matthew, forced them to secure everything inside the fort and evacuate the island by helicopter. When they returned, they finished stabilizing and packing the collections into containers wrapped in plastic, put them on pallets, and loaded them with backhoes onto a World War II landing craft—the Imt can get anything—that took them to the mainland. From there they were sent to conservators to be restored and then to the npS Southeast Archeological Center for temporary storage.

Hurricane Katrina

A yeAr LAter KAtrInA, one of the most devastating hurricanes in the history of the United States, hit Louisiana and mississippi. Almost immediately after the levees failed, flooding new Orleans and the surrounding area, the incident commander requested that Wolf go to new Orleans to assess museum collections and other cultural resource recovery needs. the first priority was at Chalmette battlefield, where the last battle of the War of 1812 between the United States and britain was fought. the visitor center’s exhibits had been flooded by three feet of water and skeletal remains in the cemetery were exposed.

Consequently, a mert was dispatched to Lafayette, Louisiana, where they were escorted by npS law enforcement officers through six military checkpoints into new Orleans, with its countless abandoned, flood-damaged homes. there were rumors of snipers and vandals, so the team members weren’t allowed out of their cars for protection. It took two hours to reach Chalmette, which is next to the levee just south of new Orleans. We saw it all,” Sonderman said. “It was 100 degrees outside. I was almost knocked down by the smell of rot and debris.” Along the way, he remembered seeing npS officers tear open large bags of dog food on street corners to feed abandoned pets.

He went to Chalmette national Cemetery, where tombstones mark the graves of over 15,000 American soldiers who died in the War of 1812 and subsequent conflicts. Several oak trees had toppled, exposing five burials from the 1800s that were tangled in the trees’ roots. A group of Army rangers was standing guard over them when Sonderman arrived. He and mary troy, an npS curator, mapped, documented, and removed the burials. “It took a couple of days and was pretty straightforward,” Sonderman said, but the cemetery

The remnants of a recreated 1800s lighthouse are seen in the background. When Katrina hit West Ship Island it demolished the recreated structure. Ironically, it also exposed bricks and other rubble in the foreground that are the remains of the original structure.

had been submerged for several days, and the smell was “profound.” Once the trees were cut up, the remians were reinterred in the same location.

At the nearby Chalmette Visitor Center, mert members salvaged a collection of guns and sabers that were rusting. they wrapped them in mattress pads and shipped them inside cardboard tubes that are normally used as molds for making building columns, to the Springfield Armory in massachusetts for conservation. “you have to be creative and use whatever you can,” West said. they stabilized and moved the rest of the collections, including uniforms and military artifacts, to a storage facility in naches trace, mississippi.

Sonderman then went to mississippi’s east and West Ship Islands, part of the Gulf Islands national Seashore park. “there was a 30-foot surge and the park was wiped out,” he said. Using GpS coordinates, he located the park’s archaeological sites from a helicopter. east Ship Island was almost submerged. All that was left on West Ship was the circular Fort massachusetts, built during the Civil War to protect mobile bay. All the other structures, including four houses and an 1880s lighthouse, were gone. the flood also revealed the remains of an earlier lighthouse. Under pressure to evacuate the area before Hurricane rita hit, Sanderman reached West Ship by boat, conducted an assessment, and mapped what was left. He recommended bringing in experts from the nearby Southeast Archeological Center for further assessment after the water receded. throughout the Katrina disaster, the team stayed at a hotel in Lafayette for about two weeks with hundreds of evacuees who were forced to leave their homes. “It was different than other disasters as we had to deal with the trauma of folks who were affected,” Sonderman said. After each incident, the team holds debriefings to help members cope with their experiences. they met several times after Katrina. now, every year from July to november, mert members keep an eye on hurricanes that might affect national parks. “It’s fascinating and exhilarating,” Sonderman said, “but as much as you’d like to go, you hope it doesn’t happen again.”

NPS curator Mary Troy recovers a fragment of human remains from Chalmette National Cemetery.

PAULA NEELY’s work has appeared in nationalgeographic.com and DIG magazine. Her article “Redefining the Adena” appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of American Archaeology.