Former NCPTT Intern Heads Project to Protect Historic Homes Damaged in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina
The historic slate, asbestos and tile roofs of New
Orleans faced an additional obstacle after Hurricane
Katrina: For safety and liability reasons, they were
excluded from Operation Blue Roof, a program run by FEMA through the Army Corps
of Engineers to cover the roofs of homes damaged during
disasters.
To answer the needs of these
excluded homes, Alice-Anne Krishnan, a former NCPTT
intern and Tulane University School of Architecture
graduate student, began running a pilot project in the
Holy Cross neighborhood in the 9th Ward to test a method
for securely applying the ubiquitous blue tarps to
historic roofs.
To date, 50 residences in
the Holy Cross area have been tarped through the pilot
project. The first phase goal is to cover 100 houses,
including a few outside the borders of historic
districts.
“The blue tarps usually have
to be nailed on, which can cause more damage on these
types of roofs,” Krishnan said. “Many of the roofs are
steep or have a unique design. Each roof requires a
different approach to getting the tarp on.”
Krishnan, whose interest
lies in the preservation of historic neighborhoods,
realized soon after the hurricane that the New Orleans
area had unique challenges. Evacuated from New Orleans
and working from NCPTT in Natchitoches from October
2005, she began to reach out to the New Orleans
preservation community and determine what the immediate
needs were.
Roofs appealed to her,
because as a former teaching assistant for NCPTT’s
Summer Institute course, Engineering for Older and
Historic Buildings, she was well aware that securing the
roof is a crucial first step to stabilizing a structure.
NCPTT encouraged Krishnan to
contact a variety of nonprofits, government agencies,
contractors and local leaders who might have an interest
in helping to build a network that could house and
transport the tarps. A key advisor from the early phase
onward was NCPTT board member, Horace Foxall, Jr., of
the USACE Seattle District’s Center for the Preservation
of Historic Buildings and Structures. He was assigned at
the time to FEMA’s Joint Field Office in Baton Rouge.
Foxall, a historic
architect, provided guidance for the first demonstration
project that was carried out in November 2005. Working
with experienced roofers and contractors, he and the
group developed a method of weighting the tarps at the
edges of the roofs and then roping them down, so that no
nails are used on the roof materials themselves.
January 2006 brought new
momentum to the project with the arrival of a grant of
materials from FEMA and two specialized Americorps
disaster relief teams from Vermont and Washington state.
Crew leader Bob Milner of the Washington Conservation
Corps (WCC) came with a strong reputation for temporary
roofing earned during the 2004 Florida hurricanes.
Residents have welcomed the
crews warmly. “I feel that this effort has restored some
hope to the homeowners we’ve worked with. They really
felt overlooked,” Krishnan said.