Helping to rescue a ravaged region
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Previous | Next| Table of Contents Hurricane Katrina, which assaulted the Gulf Coast Aug. 29 with winds up to 140 miles per hour, took a terrible toll on people and libraries. Less than four weeks later, Hurricane Rita, the third most intense storm ever recorded in the North Atlantic, came ashore in Texas, its rains compounding the damage to areas already ravaged by Katrina. Then, in late October, came Wilma, which tore across central Florida. The storms and subsequent flooding took almost 1,500 lives and made refugees of more than a million people. Thousands of libraries were also partially or completely destroyed. In Louisiana, 110 school libraries were lost, 29 public libraries were totally destroyed and 35 public libraries lost their collections. In Mississippi, 64 school libraries were lost and 11 public libraries were completely or partially destroyed. In Alabama, one school library was destroyed and two public libraries were lost. In New Orleans, eight of 12 of the public library’s branches sustained moderate to severe damage. In St. Tammany Parish, the one-year-old Pontchartrain branch, in Slidell, was blown down. "The stacks fell like dominoes," said Tanya DiMaggio, children’s services coordinator. The cost of rebuilding Louisiana’s public libraries and their collections is estimated to be $63 million, and no estimate is yet available for rebuilding school and higher-education libraries. In Mississippi, the public-libraries estimate is $40 million — and another $40 million to replace school library collections. The library of the University of Mississippi-Gulf Coast, built in 2002, may have to be totally rebuilt. Through both storms, librarians and library workers throughout the region braved floodwaters to rescue collections, and the National Guard and other emergency responders often used libraries as rescue areas. Soon after, libraries and librarians nationwide came to the aid of tens of thousands of people who had fled the storm and flocked to local libraries to find and fill out disaster-assistance applications, look for missing family and friends or send e-mails letting people know they were all right. Loretta Gharst, a librarian at the Calcasieu Parish Public Library in Lake Charles, Louisiana, described the evacuees she saw: "They were like us: black, white, Asian, Hispanic; some well off, some not. They were concerned about their families, their homes and their futures. They came to the library to get information because they couldn’t get it anywhere else. They wanted to know about finding employment, housing and registering children for school. "But most of all they wanted to go home and start pulling their lives and businesses back together." The ALA response also was immediate and dramatic. The association established the Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund, which has generated more than $300,000 in donations to ALA chapters along the Gulf Coast. Hundreds of libraries nationwide signed up for the ALA’s Adopt-a-Library Program and were matched with public, school and academic libraries in the afflicted region. And barely three weeks after Rita, following intense deliberation, the ALA decided, on October 12, to proceed with its plans to hold its 2006 Annual Conference, scheduled for June 22-28, in New Orleans. "The best thing that the association and its members can do is to go to New Orleans and lead the reconstruction by example," ALA President Michael Gorman said in announcing the decision. "Our conference will provide the jobs and tax revenues needed to help residents reestablish their lives and for the city to fully restore services, including library services. "We speak often of how libraries build communities, and now we have a chance to show the country and the world that librarians build communities, too." Early registration figures indicate that attendance at the conference should come close to pre-storm projections.
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