Below is an article from today's Daily Press online newspaper (Newport News, 
VA) that is a follow-up on the disaster on Jamestown Island from Hurricane 
Isabel. I did extensive research with those NPS collections through the 1980's 
and early 1990's and like many of my colleagues I feel my heart shredding every 
time I read about the extent of the disaster. 

I think that now, the most important thing is for the museum and preservation 
communities to glean the big picture lessons from this: risk assessment and 
proactive prevention should be at the foremost agendas of all institutions. 
Please don't wait for Chicken Little to be right! Or that 100 year flood to wait 
till next year!

(see the Canadian Conservation Institute web site for an excellent resource 
on risks to collections:  http://www.cci-icc.gc.ca/framework/index_e.shtml. 
also see the Heritage Preservation web site for the Heritage national Emergency 
Task Force site: http://www.heritagepreservation.org/PROGRAMS/TASKFER.HTM)

Cheers!
Dave

David Harvey
Artifacts
2930 South Birch Street
Denver, CO  80222
303-300-5257
[log in to unmask]
______________________________________

A wave of outrage on Jamestown Island
Bad luck, poor planning and Isabel threaten collection


  By Mark St. John Erickson
Daily Press

October 11, 2003
Three weeks after the storm waters of Hurricane Isabel swept through the 
National Park Service Visitor Center at Jamestown, 300 moldy artifact cabinets 
stand in a Fort Lee warehouse, filling the air with the throat-rasping stench of 
a massive archaeological disaster.
Bad luck, a missed opportunity and a misdirected hurricane plan opened the 
gates to a flood that submerged one of America's most important links to its 
historic 1607 beginnings. Now an epic rescue project must attempt to save a 
collection of more than 900,000 artifacts at an estimated cost of $11.4 million.
Here and across the country, historians and archaeologists of the period are 
voicing shock - some of it mixed with outrage and disgust - at the magnitude 
of the catastrophe. Park Service curator Jackie Holt, who left her collection 
thinking she had done all she could two days before Isabel struck, is still 
stunned by what she found when she returned.
Five feet of water flowed into the basement collections area from the 
adjacent salt marsh and nearby James River, contaminating artifacts that had escaped 
countless other brushes with flooding over the past 47 years. Thousands of 
photographs and pages of archaeological field notes were soaked so badly that 
Holt feared the originals would be lost.
"Everybody said to prepare for a few inches of water in your office. And 
that's what we did. We moved computers. We moved research boxes. We covered things 
with plastic and sandbagged the doors," Holt said.
"But we didn't prepare for 5 feet of water - and that's what happened. I'm 
still in shock. I'm embarrassed. I can't believe it."
Archaeologist Dennis Blanton, who is head of the College of William and 
Mary's Center for Archaeological Research, felt much the same way when he arrived 
on the waterlogged island the day after the hurricane.
During the 1990s, he and other local scientists labored passionately for the 
Park Service's Jamestown Archaeological Assessment program. That left him with 
an intimate connection to the soggy mess of artifacts and records that still 
dripped with brackish-smelling tidal water.
"I was speechless when I saw the damage. It was heart-breaking," Blanton said.
"This is a true tragedy - and the worse part is that it never should have 
happened."
Much of the criticism of the Park Service's stewardship focuses on the 
location of the building, which was constructed for the 350th anniversary 
celebration of the founding of Jamestown in 1957.
Designed by the agency's Eastern Office of Design and Construction and the 
Philadelphia architectural firm of Gilboy, Ballante & Clauss, the structure 
embraced an NPS directive known as Mission 66, which pushed parks across the 
country to erect their visitor centers as close to their historic resources as 
possible.
That left little more than a marshfront site at low-lying Jamestown Island, 
where the highest, most suitable locations were already occupied by either 
archaeological sites or the memorial church, monuments and historic structures 
owned by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. It also 
led the designers to place the vast collection of artifacts in the basement of 
the building, where the park's visitors could easily see the objects and the 
curatorial process.
Even during construction, however, Park Service archaeologist John L. Cotter, 
who began a pioneering dig of the New Towne area of Jamestown in 1953 - and 
witnessed the flooding caused by Hurricane Hazel in 1954 - questioned the 
architects' decisions.
"Aren't you digging that basement too deep?" he reportedly asked.
Historian Warren M. Billings, who is chairman of the APVA's Jamestown 
Rediscovery Advisory Board and a member of the Interior Department's Jamestown 400th 
Commemoration Commission, also saw the wrath of Hazel.
He and his family were trapped in their home on the island for three days 
because of the storm's floodwaters.
"People have known about the flooding problem at Jamestown for 400 years," 
said Billings, who now heads the history department at the University of New 
Orleans. "So I just don't know what that person was thinking when they designed 
the visitor center and put it where it is." 
The Park Service recognized the threat early on, in fact, and at least once 
in recent years debated moving the collection off the island.
But resistance from the staff of Colonial National Historical Park - which 
administers Jamestown and the Yorktown Battlefield - as well as from other 
figures in the agency quelled the informal proposal.
In 1993, however, the park's general management plan acknowledged the danger 
bluntly, stating that "floodwater could cause serious damage." It also 
launched a long-term effort to erect a new collections building that "would withstand 
a hurricane-force storm and safely protect the archaeological collection."
Ten years later, construction of just such a building is scheduled to begin 
in a few weeks. The APVA and the Park Service, which will fund and occupy the 
$4.2 million, 8,000-square-foot structure through a partnership agreement, 
broke ground at the new site only 14 days before Isabel struck.
"That's the most horrible part of this whole thing," said Holt, who was hired 
11 months ago because of her experience in moving a large collection at 
another park.
"After all this time, we're finally building a new building. But it's going 
to be finished 14 months too late."
Saddled with a low-lying basement structure, Holt's predecessors learned to 
expect flooding in the collection's office whenever the nearby tidal swamp 
flooded.
The water there often reached a depth of several inches, she said. But not 
once in nearly 47 years did it ever well up far enough to endanger the artifact 
storage area behind the office.
Based on that experience, Holt followed hurricane procedures that had been 
adequate in the past, clearing her office, covering items with plastic and 
sandbagging exterior and interior doors. She also backed up the collection's 
immense paper catalog with an electronic copy.
Most of her worries focused on the visitor center's leak-prone roof, however, 
and the potential threat posed by Hurricane Floyd-like rains to the exhibits 
on the main floor. Equally troubling, she believed, was the danger of falling 
trees crashing through a series of vulnerable floor-to-ceiling windows.
"I actually took paintings off the walls and put them in the basement because 
we were expecting so much damage to the roof and windows from the wind and 
the rain," Holt said.
"But it never happened the way we thought it would happen. We prepared for 
the wrong storm."
At the APVA laboratory and collections vault near the Jamestown Visitor 
Center, Jamestown Rediscovery director William Kelso and his staff prepared for 
Isabel based on past experience, too.
What they remembered was being trapped by floodwaters during the Twin 
Nor'easters of 1998 - and the sight of crabs scuttling across the floor of their old 
riverfront lab after Hurricane Floyd.
"We get fish coming in from the swamp whenever it floods more than a little 
bit," says Jamestown Rediscovery curator Bly Straube. "It's quite a sight to 
look out over what used to be a field and see them jumping."
Such scenes prompted Kelso, Straube and their colleagues to assume the worst 
as they worked, despite the fact that their own collection of 500,000 
artifacts from the 1607 fort has been housed in a storm-hardened, $1.5 million 
building since 1999.
It also persuaded them to call Holt and offer a safer place for some of the 
Park Service's most important objects early in the morning on the day before 
the hurricane.
"Obviously, they couldn't move the major part of the collection. It was the 
records and the photographs that we offered to take," Kelso said. "But they 
didn't take us up on it."
Holt was at the dentist, in fact, when the APVA called and left a message on 
her phone. She drove to her home in Hampton not long after her appointment 
when she heard that parts of the city had been ordered to evacuate.
At least two other Park Service personnel knew about the APVA's call. No one 
acted on the offer.
"You can't just throw this stuff on the back of a truck and drive it off," 
Holt said, explaining that she might not have acted even if she had learned of 
the call in time.
"This is something that should have been worked out between their director 
and ours."
Similar kinds of friction took place immediately after the storm when the 
APVA, whose well-protected collection emerged from the hurricane unscathed, 
attempted to offer assistance.
Kelso, who had been stranded in his nearby house by a neck-deep flood, had an 
angry exchange with a senior Park Service official when he and Blanton made 
their way over to the devastated collections building the next morning. Straube 
was turned away by a park ranger when she attempted to drive onto the island 
to join the cleanup crew.
The renowned curator's experience later proved invaluable, however, when she 
and the rest of the APVA's archaeological staff finally received a plea for 
help.
Moving through the artifacts quickly because of her familiarity with the 
collection, Straube stopped one crew from washing an assortment of 19th-century 
iron objects, then re-directed the rescue team's attention to an unnoticed 
collection of particularly significant finds from early Jamestown. 
After the visitor center was condemned, she led the effort to save more than 
300 artifacts from the exhibits on the main floor.
"My heart bled for them," Straube said, describing the task that stunned Park 
Service personnel faced as they attempted to sift through hundreds of 
thousands of water-ravaged objects.
"But the truth is - with this kind of collection - you really need someone 
who knows the 17th century in order to do the job. And there was no one on site 
with the experience and the expertise to know what to do."
The APVA volunteers worked more than 400 hours over the next few days, 
joining Holt and scores of Park Service personnel in a frantic effort to move the 
collection out of the building before it was formally condemned. Conservators 
from Colonial Williamsburg showed up, too, helping to move 300 steel cabinets 
out of the basement and into a fleet of waiting trucks.
Four days and 30 truckloads later, most of the collection had been 
transported to a 17,000-square-foot warehouse at Fort Lee near Petersburg.
Now Holt, a team of volunteers and a conservation firm from Texas are 
cleaning the contaminated objects by hand and sorting through the mass for follow-up 
treatment.
Virtually all the artifacts can be saved, the Park Service curator said, 
describing a project so huge that it is expected to take as long as three years. 
Late Friday, she also received word from a New York conservation firm that the 
accompanying collection of archival records and photographs, which Blanton 
described as "the glue that holds all those artifacts together," also can be 
rescued after treatment.
Still, the stream of e-mails and phone calls in the archaeological community 
"is just blazing" - as one scientist said - over the vastness of the damage 
and the reasons behind it.
"Oh, my God!" gasped Nick Luccketti, head of the James River Institute for 
Archaeology - and a former senior archaeologist at the APVA's Jamestown dig - 
when he heard about the $11.4 million price tag.
"It's unfortunate that the Park Service has been forced to keep the 
collection in a building that was never suited for it - and it's easy to second-guess 
them now. 
"But they dropped the ball when it came to what must be one of their highest 
priorities," Luccketti said, after catching his breath.
"Sure, bad luck had a lot to do with it. They were incredibly unlucky. But 
you can't count on luck going your way when you have that kind of responsibility 
- or use bad luck as an excuse."
Other scientists reacted with sadness and anger, too - especially those who 
have worked closely with Jamestown and its staff in the past.
Blanton, in particular, took great pains as he tried to size up the factors 
behind the disaster.
"What this really is, is a commentary on the Park Service - and where its 
priorities have gone over the past 10 years," Blanton said.
"I know the people at Jamestown, and they are painfully aware of the 
shortcomings in their budget and in their staff. 
"But the agency they work for is not taking care of business - and that means 
supporting its own people and giving them what they need to protect these 
kinds of collections."

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