Hurricane Isabel Is Disaster For National Park
Service
By Deborah Fitts
November 2003
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Isabel, the hurricane that
struck the mid-Atlantic states Thursday, Sept. 18, wreaked havoc
at several prominent Civil War parks in the National Park System.
"This is the worst disaster we've ever had to deal with
- by far," David Barna, spokesman for the National Park
Service (NPS).
Special "incident command teams" totaling more than
350 NPS personnel from across the country responded to help
clean up the parks, with many crews still at work at presstime
in mid-October.
The major loss was trees, many of which fell across roads and
trails or pulled earthworks apart when root balls were torn
from the ground. Barna said 12,400 trees had fallen across roads
and trails at 26 federal parks in six states, with Petersburg
and Richmond among the most severely hit.
Officials were assembling a cleanup cost, expected to be in
the tens of millions, in order to seek a supplemental appropriation
from Congress to pay for it.
Sandy Rives, NPS director in Virginia, echoed Barna. "This
is by far the most complex response to an incident that NPS
has ever tried to handle," Rives said. "A huge geographic
area was affected. In battlefield parks it's trees - tree after
tree after tree, many of them hanging and creating a safety
problem."
If Congress fails to supply special funding for the cleanup,
Rives said, "We'd have to try to do it with existing budgets,
and that would be impossible. The parks would be in a horrible
state of
repair, and a lot of the work would just go undone." Rives,
former superintendent at the Fredericksburg battlefield, cited
a personal loss, a 125-foot-tall Kentucky coffee tree that barely
missed the park headquarters at Chatham on the Rappahannock
River. "I just can't imagine it without the tree,"
he said.
Here is a roundup at affected national parks. See related
story for other Civil War sites:
Fredericksburg
At Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park
in Virginia, Superintendent Russ Smith tallied 800 trees fallen
on roads and trails alone in the 8,000-acre park. Some locations
were closed as long as 10 days. Two 10-member incident command
teams armed with
chain saws helped the park staff tackle the mess.
By mid-October, Smith said work had yet to start in removing
trees that had fallen on earthworks, some ripping out large
clumps of dirt. NPS officials were discussing the best method
of re-inserting the dirt. Cleanup at his park alone would total
several million dollars,
Smith predicted.
A helicopter ride over the park five days after the storm revealed
spotty damage, Smith said, with huge tangles of fallen trees
immediately next to areas that escaped relatively unscathed.
Lee
Drive was hit particularly hard, with "little micro-bursts"
of wind felling large swathes of trees.
The Spotsylvania battlefield fared better. Smith said it was
the large, mature trees that suffered the most. A wet summer
and more than 7 inches of rain accompanying the storm saturated
and softened the ground, weakening the roots' grip.
Smith had been in his new post as superintendent only three
or four weeks before the storm. "I hope they didn't arrange
this for my benefit," he said wryly.
Despite the heavy workload, several park staffers took time
to honor Pvt. James Clarey of the 57th New York Infantry, whose
grave in the National Cemetery was opened when a tree fell.
Smith said the torn-out roots exposed leg and foot bones of
Clarey, 32, who was one of two members of his unit to die when
they stood on the Rappahannock bank to provide supporting fire
as Federals launched boats across the water in the opening moments
of the battle of Fredericksburg.
Four of the park's military veterans directed the low-key re-interment
ceremony. An American Legion honor guard joined the crew and
Taps was played. Smith said the staffers who found the bones
were "quite affected" by it. They think constantly
of the soldiers who fought in the battles, he said, "But
to actually see one - it shook them."
Petersburg
At Petersburg National Battlefield in Virginia, Superintendent
Bob Kirby cited major damage to the park's City Point unit,
where wind took a 300-year old cedar tree near Appomattox Manor
and did significant damage to the bluff overlooking the James
and Appomattox rivers.
The park lost power for 10 days, Kirby said, and did not reopen
till Oct. 2, and then on a "very limited" basis pending
the removal of trees.
The "witness" tree, which Union Gen. Ulysses Grant
would have walked under, was the last of the cedars that once
lined the entrance to Appomattox Manor. Grant established a
major supply depot at City Point in June 1864, a facility that
Kirby said "was in many ways the Normandy Beach of the
Civil War."
The manor and other historic buildings escaped undamaged, but
Kirby said the 75-foot bluff sustained $1 million in damage
when trees lining the top fell, tearing out "large chunks"
of soil. The storm also destroyed an 80-foot viewing and fishing
platform that the park partnered with the City of Hopewell to
build.
The city contacted the Federal Emergency Management Agency for
help in the waterfront cleanup, and about 60 NPS incident command
personnel descended on the park. The Army at Fort Lee let the
park dump tons of tree debris at the fort's dump site.
At the park's main unit, a bushel-basket-sized hole that had
opened over the Crater tunnel grew larger as heavy rains drenched
the soil. "The storm expanded the collapse," Kirby
said, and the park poured sand into the void to shore it up.
Archaeologists studying the tunnel in the future will be able
to distinguish the sand as a later addition, he noted. The tunnel,
a Union engineering feat 511 feet long and 4 feet high, is as
deep as 20 feet underground, Kirby said.
As recently as the 1930s and 40s tourists were allowed inside,
but the tunnel is now regarded as unsafe. Kirby said he was
requesting a study by ground-penetrating radar to determine
its condition.
He said significant damage was done to the park's earthworks
by trees, with Fort Fisher sustaining the most. Ironically,
the park was in its first year of a three-year, $600,000 project
to remove trees from earthworks in order to prevent such damage.
"The archaeologists want us to put the root ball back in
the hole, but it never fits," Kirby said. He estimated
that park cleanup would total $3 million, excluding City Point.
"We hope Congress will give us a storm appropriation,"
he said. "If not, we're toast."
Gettysburg
Officials at Gettysburg National Military Park in south-central
Pennsylvania never shut the park down. They did, however, close
off Little Round Top, Devil's Den, the National Cemetery, Culp's
Hill and South Confederate Avenue on Friday due to fallen trees
and debris.
"There wasn't an enormous amount of damage," said
park spokesman Katie Lawhon. "Not much rain" accompanied
Isabel, which by the time it reached Gettysburg had diminished
to a tropical storm.
The marker on South Confederate Avenue to the brigade of Confederate
Gen. Evander Law, a 3-foot granite pedestal with a bronze plaque,
sustained minor damage when a tree struck and bent the plaque.
Lawhon said it would be heated and straightened.
Five Gettysburg park employees were sent south to assist at
damaged parks.
Richmond
At Richmond National Battlefield Park in Virginia, Superintendent
Cynthia MacLeod said Drewry's Bluff, where an 1862 Confederate
fort overlooks the James River, had sloughed some of its face,
leaving the fort "in more jeopardy than ever to catastrophic
failure."
The unit remained closed in early October; stabilization of
the 90-foot bluff could be the park's "single biggest expense,"
MacLeod said.
More than 1,500 trees fell at the park, many of them damaging
earthworks by pulling out large root balls or by falling on
the works. Tree cleanup alone at the park's dozen units was
"approaching $2 million," MacLeod said.
Damage to buildings was minor. There was some water damage to
the interior of the Watt House at Gaines's Mill, and a small
piece of the porch on the log cabin at the Fort Harrison unit
was smashed by a toppling pine tree.
Harpers Ferry
At Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia,
the
River crested at 21 feet, 3 feet above flood stage, but not
high enough to cause anything more than "cosmetic"
damage, according to Superintendent Don Campbell.
On Sept. 16 Campbell ordered the evacuation of all artifacts
and exhibits from the park's Lower Town. About 100 staffers
undertook the mammoth, two-day task of loading the contents
of 20 buildings into four tractor-trailers, an exercise they
have accomplished several
times during recent floods.
Campbell said the storm struck on the evening of the 18th with
50-to-60-mph sustained winds, dropping trees and knocking out
power for two days, and forcing the shutdown of the park on
the 19th and 20th. The evacuation process was reversed and all
exhibits back to normal by the 24th.
"Compared to many parks, this time around we fared quite
well," Campbell said. "Which is unusual for Harpers
Ferry. We usually get the brunt of storms."
Manassas
At Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia, "We
didn't get hit too bad," said Superintendent Robert Sutton.
A two-day shutdown was followed by a trail-cleanup effort that
he said would take several days.
Appomattox
At Appomattox Court House National Historical Park in Virginia,
a spokesman said there were downed trees and broken fences when
the storm roared through the night of the 18th, "but nothing
major we couldn't handle." The park lost power until the
23rd, but remained open to visitors except for a few hours the
morning after the storm.
Antietam
At Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland, Superintendent
John Howard said a non-historic wagon shed at the Piper Barn
was destroyed when the roof was torn off by winds that gusted
to 65 and 70 mph. The park closed Friday but never lost power.
Tree damage was the major result of the storm, Howard said.
But one of the most famous of all Civil War "witness"
trees, a large sycamore at the end of Burnside Bridge, came
through unscathed.
A severe thunderstorm two weeks earlier blew down nearly 20
trees in the National Cemetery, including some dating from the
dedication in 1876. Howard estimated $45,000 to $50,000 in structural
damage on the battlefield and another $20,000 in labor preparing
for the storm and cleaning up.
Monocacy
The staff at Monocacy National Battlefield in Maryland has evacuated
before, because of flooding, and knew what to do. Chief of Interpretation
Cathy Beeler said they rented a trailer and packed up the first
floor of the visitor center the day before Isabel was due.
They packed "everything" she said - doors, electrical
outlets, phones - the lower level was stripped. To protect against
wind and rain from possible broken windows the computers upstairs
were unplugged and wrapped in plastic. The hurricane passed
and everything was put back in place on Saturday.
Some trees came down but the park did not have a lot of damage.
"We were very thankful we were bypassed," said Beeler,
but the relief was short-lived. Four days later they had 6.5
inches of rain.Some of the staff were on their way to work and
were stuck in a traffic backup on the Interstate caused by a
sinkhole. "All our cell phones started ringing," Beeler
said. The park maintenance man was telling them to get there
fast.
Another trailer was rented and the downstairs of the visitor
center was stripped again as the Monocacy River flooded. The
water stopped rising at the doorstep.
The National Park Service and Monocacy staff have been planning
a new visitor center for two years. Beeler said, "We're
all very, very, very anxious for that to happen."
The new center will be on higher ground. Its exhibits "will
be unlike anything in the Park Service," according to Beeler.
Instead of the traditional theater and slide show type of presentation,
Monocacy will tell the story of the July 9, 1864, battle, and
the before and after, through interactive exhibits. The project
is in the 2005 budget. She hopes it will be moved up to 2004.
