Unfinished 9/11 Museum Is Flooded

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times.. The West Chamber of the National September 11 Memorial Museum in 2010, with the last column removed from the World Trade Center site after 9/11 visible at left, under wraps. About 70 feet below street level, the chamber was badly flooded.

The main floor of the National September 11 Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center is flooded with at least five feet of water.

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.

The extent of the damage is not clear. The most important and vulnerable of the artifacts on the floor is the last column left standing from the twin towers, which is covered with graffiti spray-painted by first responders, rescuers and recovery workers.

A spokeswoman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which controls the trade center site, said Thursday that it was too early to tell how much of the last column was un der water. The spokeswoman, Lisa MacSpadden, said officials “will have to assess once the pumping is complete.”

Focused on the recovery efforts after Hurricane Sandy, officials from the Port Authority and the museum's foundation would discuss the extent of flooding and possible damage.

But because construction has been delayed by a protracted financing dispute between the Port Authority and the memorial foundation that was not resolved until Sept. 10, the museum is nowhere near completion.

That means there may be a chance to build in measures to safeguard the collection and perhaps to rethink how many artifacts ought to be placed on the main floor, which is 68 feet below the memorial plaza.

It could, in fact, become a laboratory for design in the face of extreme weather.

“Our climate is changing,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said when he endorsed President Obama's re-election last week. As chairman of the memorial foundation, and by exten sion the most senior executive of the museum, Mr. Bloomberg will have a chance to acknowledge that change on a tangible level.

It was understood that a portion of the memorial was to be constructed in a 100-year flood plain - that is, an area of dry land with a 1 percent chance of flooding each year due to storms (and, therefore, a 100 percent chance of being flooded once a century).

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.”

It did not seem conceivable then that a 100-year flood would occur during Hurricane Irene last year - before the museum's opening day - and that a second disruptive storm would pass through 14 months later.

“They call it the hundred-year flood because it's only supposed to happen every hundred years, ” Governor Cuomo said Tuesday after touring the flooded trade center. “I told President Obama, we have a hundred-year flood every two years.”

Because of the way the museum space is threaded through the foundations of the World Trade Center, its main floor is actually the lowest. There, in what is called the West Chamber, stands an exposed section of the slurry wall that helped protect the trade center's foundations from the naturally high water table around it.

Besides the last column, several other significant artifacts are in place. They include the so-called survivors' stairway that was a path to safety on Sept. 11, 2001; a cross-shaped steel beam, found in the ruins, at which rescue and recovery workers celebrated Mass; fire trucks used by Ladder Company 3 and Engine Company 21; and a damaged taxi cab.

All but the very largest objects, like the stairway, have been under wraps and may have been spared any damage. But five feet of water would almost surely have touched, if not flooded, vitrines and display cases filled with the intimate and irreplaceable artifacts that have been donated, both spontaneously and in response to an acquisition campaign seeking photographs, videotapes, recovered property, clothing and other personal effects, workplace memorabilia, documents, letters, printed copies of e-mails, and diaries. The museum's collection includes the radio used on the morning of 9/11 by Chief Peter J. Ganci, the highest-ranking Fire Department officer in uniform to die that day.

Politics and nature have conspired to give museum officials a chance to think about how they will decide what they will display on the main floor and how they will safeguard those objects in any flood.