In this video created by the Associated Press, Founder Sandy Rosenthal explains why New Orleans and the nation needs the Flooded House Museum.
The home, at the actual site of a major levee breach will both a memorial to those lost in the 2005 flooding and a monument for the survivors.
Please join Levees.org and the residents of Filmore Gardens for a Ribbon Cutting ceremony. After three years of work, Levees.org will unveil its Flooded House Museum.
Sat March 23 at 10:00 a.m.
4918 Warrington Drive, New Orleans
LaToya Cantrell, the Mayor of New Orleans, is scheduled to attend.
The unique museum – once a single family residence – flooded to its roof line when the London Avenue Canal breached just a few yards away during Hurricane Katrina.
Starting on Saturday, visitors can view an artist’s replica of a typical family room – filled with music and love – as it looked when the home owners returned.
Like a diorama, the exhibit will be visible through the windows of the one-story brick house.
Descriptive plaques on the house’s columns will explain the flooding story starting the day before the levees broke.
The permanent exhibit, which is free and open to the public, is both an educational monument and a solemn memorial.
The exhibit replicates how over 130,000 homes in New Orleans may have appeared after the Army Corps of Engineers’ floodwalls failed and when homeowners returned from their flood-imposed exile.
In the past four weeks, two international media houses have stated – accurately – that the Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for the levee breach events of August 2005.
The two examples are noteworthy because in both cases, the flooding details were quite outside of the point of the story.
And in both cases, the details were included as established facts; household knowledge if you will.
In a Reuters story discussing Brad Pitt’s philanthropy in a poor New Orleans neighborhood, reporter Rob Walker wrote,
“After Katrina, [Brad] Pitt decried the injustice of the Lower Ninth Ward suffering because a federally guaranteed floodwall had failed.”
In a Bloomberg Businessweek story discussing revenues to Gulf states from royalties on offshore drilling, reporter Nichola Groom wrote:
” The changes [to revenues] followed national outrage over the administration’s botched emergency response to catastrophic flooding from the systematic failure of the federally constructed levee system in New Orleans.”
