9/11 Museum Memorializing One Catastrophe, Learning From Another

Foundation Hall, the main floor of the National September 11 Memorial Museum, after floodwater was pumped out. The Engine Company 21 fire truck is under plastic wrapping at lower right. At upper right is the truck used by Ladder Company 3, also shrink-wrapped. The draped structure with vents at the left of the photo is the enclosure that protects the last column of the tw in towers.

Politics and nature have conspired to give the National September 11 Memorial and Museum a chance to reimagine itself; not in its fundamental mission or its basic layout perhaps, but in the way it presents the story of 9/11 through artifacts too precious, personal and evocative to risk. Again.

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times.. The delicacy of the museum's artifacts is exemplified by this small-scale Statue of Liberty, which stood outside a Midtown fire house and was covered in personal memorabilia.

A week ago, floodwate r reached up to seven feet on the museum's main floor, 68 feet below the memorial plaza at the World Trade Center site.

Large objects already in place - the last column of the twin towers, a steel cross from 6 World Trade Center, the fire trucks used on 9/11 by Engine Company 21 and Ladder Company 3 - were flooded last week, though apparently not immersed.

(As of Monday, after round-the-clock pumping, about 16 million gallons of water had been drained from the museum, leaving only small amounts, according to the office of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.)

“I am beyond angry,” said Michael Burke, whose brother, Capt. William F. Burke Jr. of Engine Company 21, was killed on Sept. 11, 2001. “Those trucks should never have been there in the first place. They belong - by every stretch of common sense and duty - in a plaza-level museum.”

Seven feet of water would almost surely have immersed vitrines and display cases filled with the intimate and irreplaceable objects that have been donated, spontaneously and in response to an acquisition campaign: photographs, videotapes, clothing, personal effects, workplace memorabilia, documents, diaries, letters and one-of-a-kind mementos like the radio used on 9/11 by Chief Peter J. Ganci, the highest-ranking uniformed fire officer to be killed in the attack.

“If we had been open and this happened, the devastation would have been really, really hard to handle,” said Joseph C. Daniels, the president and chief executive of the museum.

Therein, the silver lining: the museum hasn't opened.

Construction was all but halted by a protracted financing dispute between the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center Foundation, headed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is controlled by Governor Cuomo and Gov. Chris Christie.

What was once a political embarrassment may now turn out to be a saving grace. It has given museum officials the chance to build in measures to safeguard the collection.

“As bad as it is, it's definitely a glass half full,” Mr. Daniels said. “It points out the obvious precept that there's no circumstance under which this will happen again, when we have all those precious items in there.”

This doesn't necessarily mean that no irreplaceable objects would be displayed on the main floor of the museum, but that some kind of evacuation mechanism or procedure would be created to ensure their swift protection or removal in the face of looming threats.

Lower Manhattan Development Corporation The 2004 environmental impact statement for the World Trade Center redevelopment project included a map that clearly showed - in dark gray - that the entire western edge of the site sat in the 100-year flood plain.

Eight years ago, it was understood that a portion of the memorial was to be constructed in a 100-year flood plain. In the environmental impact statement of 2004, which acknowledged the flood risk, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation stated that “because the locational aspect of the event is paramount to the memorial itself, relocating the W.T.C. memorial is not practicable.”

Even then, the 70-foot-deep, concrete-lined trade center foundation was referred to as a “bathtub,” though it was a bathtub in reverse, designed to keep water out of the site.

“I was very surprised that the water was able to enter into the bathtub, considering all the effort and expense that has gone into the design and construction of the site,” said Guy Nordenson, a professor of structural engineering and architecture at Princeton University and a principal in Guy Nordenson & Associates. “There are many things of great importance and value in the basement, not just the artifacts of the museum collection. Perhaps some of the artifacts could be moved, but better yet, the site should be protected against flooding in the future.”

Though there were warning signs, it would have been hard to conceive in 2004 that such catastrophic flooding might become more or less commonplace.

“They call it the 100-year flood because it's only supposed to happen every 100 years,” Mr. Cuomo said last week. “I told President Obama, we have a 100-year flood every two years.” The question is, what does Governor Cuomo intend to do about it in directing the Port Authority's construction work at the trade center?

The same can be asked of Mayor Bloomberg, who stated flatly last week, “Our climate is changing.”

As chairman of the memorial foundation, and by extension the senior-most executive of the 9/11 museum, Mr. Bloomberg has a chance to acknowledge that change tangibly. Will he preside over the completion of the last pre-Hurricane Sandy cultural institution in New York, or the first to take the storm's sobering lessons to heart?

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times.. The wrapped structure at left, in Foundation Hall in 2010, enlcoses the last column standing of the original twin towers.

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