Only the identifying artifacts saved at some Orleans homes|[08/29/07]
Published 12:00 am Wednesday, August 29, 2007
NEW ORLEANS — Each flooded house here may well have a story to tell. Not many of them, however, can be saved.
Indeed, of the approximately 25,000 homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina, 15,000 have been or will be torn down.
That’s where archeological assessment teams have come in. As the work goes on, they document unique or historic characteristics of structures about to be crushed and hauled away, and sometimes save pieces or samples.
“Look,” said Gail Lazaras, an archeological monitor working under contract to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “That’s barge board,” she said pointing to a layer of wood behind an outer layer of siding on an Upper 9th Ward home.
She went on to explain something very logical. In earlier days, river barges were made of wood. Under steam power, they could be pushed back up the Mississippi River empty to be refilled with another load of cotton or some other crop to be shipped out from the Port of New Orleans.
However, marginal or worn-out barges were left behind at the last port on the river. They became scrap, but valuable scrap. The sturdy timbers, which can still be identified by their thickness and by the saw marks on them more than 100 years later, were quickly harvested by craftsmen building homes in the expanding city.
Her voice almost drowned out by a track hoe smashing a house less than 100 yards away, Lazaras seemed pleased. She’d spotted real evidence of the evolution of life in America in one simple board in one simple house.
“Simple,” however, is not a word that describes many buildings in this city. Out in the suburbs, there are the one-story ranch-style brick homes that can be found anywhere. It’s in the older areas that there are block after block, row after row of wood homes where generations of working people have lived. At a glance, they may all look alike