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New Orleans, LA
September 2009
Building Up Tulane’s Library
Hurricane Katrina flooded the basement of
Tulane University’s library. With the help of $16 million from FEMA, the school is adding
floors to the top of the building to avoid similar storm damage in the future.
The bottom floor of Howard Tilton actually took on about 8 feet of water.
So all the mechanical, electric, plumbing, the
air conditioning systems were on the bottom
floor, as well as some of major collections,
government documents, the Maxwell music
collection, and some other important historical collections.
They were all underwater, all 8 feet so the
mechanical system couldn’t be fixed. It was
pretty much ruined. And then the collections
that were there, many of them were taken out
and taken to a site in Dallas, Texas, where
they were able to freeze-dry them and restore some of those documents.
The basement has been gutted, there is
nothing down there. Since the storm, we’ve
been working through the process with FEMA of replacing the space we had in the
basement, mitigating future damage so we don’t have flooding.
When the building was originally constructed, they put in enough foundation to add four
floors. This will involve putting some structure on top of the roof of the current building and
then adding 2 floors, one that will house
mechanicals and some collections and then another floor of collections.
FEMA actually showed up on our campus in
October of 2005 and I would say since that time we’ve been through numerous team
members here, you know back and forth on what would be approved and not approved.
But in the last 12 months, the team that has been in place, and in particular, the team
that’s been in place since January, has been
phenomenal to work with. I think they
completely understand what we’re dealing with.
Before the storm, Tulane had an enrollment of
about 13,000 students. After Katrina hit, we
went down to about 11,200. So we lost quite a few students.
I’m happy to say today that we’ve crossed over the 12,000 mark. The freshmen class
that came in this year was about 1500 students, which puts us back where we were
before the storm. And we still have a senior
class that’s relatively small, because that was
the class that came in the first year after
Katrina, but our enrollment is back very strong now.
For more information visit www.fema.gov