I had mentioned several weeks ago to reader gstone that I had seen post Katrina photographs of the Craftsman cottage featured in the Bay Bungalow post. Due to ongoing computer problems I am not able to find the photos I was thinking of, but I did come across these images and a damage assessment form of 119 Washington Street from the MDAH HRI database. The photos paint a pretty bleak portrait, especially with debris from at least a dozen other structures having acted as projectiles piled several feet high in the yard. Thankfully the damage assessment gives some foreshadowing that this beauty of a bungalow fared better than it may appear on first glance, despite receiving approximately six feet of storm surge inside the structure. Of course to see what the bungalow looks like today you can trek back to the Bay Bungalow post here.
Categories: Bay St. Louis, Hurricane Katrina, MDAH, MS Dept. of Archives and History
Preservation in Mississippi 
Thanks for sharing these images. Seeing that survey form brings back memories of the long hot days of survey work our MDAH / MHT teams did in the first six weeks after Katrina. Architectural historian Brenda Rubach Crook filled out that form and you can tell that by the end of September, we had seen so many houses off their foundations, front walls missing, etc, that this one rated only a “Minor” in the overall damage category.
We at MDAH are finally uploading these images to the Historic Resources Database, which is a time-consuming process, and we also hope to have the entire collection of damage assessment photos available as a Digital Archives collection through the archives division (this collection of probably 10,000 photos could be more easily browsed as a unified digital collection). We also plan to do a series of 10th anniversary posts on the MDAH blog, Sense of Place, describing our damage assessment survey in the weeks after Katrina, the many volunteer teams of architects and engineers who met with homeowners, and of course, the Katrina Grant program that helped save this and hundreds of other historic buildings on the Coast and inland. We hope these posts, along with the images, will be a valuable record of Katrina and its aftermath for many generations.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Wow the task of uploading sounds like it will be as daunting a task as the original surveys were. I am really looking forward to those MDAH blog posts and the entire Collection of damage assessment photos being available on the MDAH HRI database.
LikeLike
That will be a fantastic resource — let us know at the SEAA so we can refer folks to the Digital Archive url.
LikeLiked by 1 person