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.