Atlanta Flooding – American Disasters

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I loved going to the State of Emergency exhibit even though I am not that much of an art person. As I was walking through the exhibit, I loved seeing the power of art and how it can portray disaster in an appropriate manner. Piece by piece, I respected more and more the feelings of the people within the disasters…

Then, boom. I saw the piece about the Atlanta flood of 2009. All of these memories came flooding (no pun intended) back into my mind. Molly shouldn’t feel guilty about not remembering. Some areas of Atlanta were more affected than others.

It had rained non-stop for a week. The saturday before the flooding became disastrous (September 19th), I ran in the Gwinnett County XC meet. The meet is hosted on these soccer fields on the banks of the Chattahoochee (official called River Green Park). About 1/3 of the course was under water, people ran the slowest times we had ever run, and we have a picture of us laying down in a creek that was made by the rain. At the 2-mile mark, the water on the field was about 2 feet deep, and a bunch of runners lost their spikes (running shoes) in the mud underneath the water. Runners in the JV races were mud-surfing on the course. Everyone’s team color was brown by the end of the meet.

Sunday night into Monday morning (September 20th-21st), the flooding took a turn for the worse. The Chattahoochee and all of its run-offs couldn’t take any more water. My mom works at my school, so she wanted to leave extra-early to make sure that we could get to school on time (8:00). We live about 15 minutes away from school. We left at 6:30 so that my mom could get there by 7:15; we got to school at 8:45, and my mom was one of the first staff members there. On the way, we made so many “illegal” U-turns because rivers were running across roads (Part of every interstate in metro-Atlanta was under water, including the 14/16 lane downtown connector). At one of these river-road crossings, we saw a car up against the trees where the current met the woods on the side of the road. Most cars that tried to cross the water made it. This car wasn’t so lucky. I don’t know if that person made it or not (I’m pretty sure he or she did. The only memory burned into my brain is the car), but the majority of fatalities were due to failed flood crossings in cars (needless to say, I don’t like talking about this specific memory). They cancelled school at 9:30 that morning, which was after a lot of students had already arrived. We didn’t have school for the next two days because too many roads were closed to make it to any destination.

Throughout the day, a creek started running through our back yard (from the back of it to our house and around the sides of our house). On one side of our house, the debris from our back yard clogged up the water to the fence, so we had a sort of pond on the back corner of our house. My dad was working out of town, so my older brother had to walk into the pond and unclog the area next to the fence. The water was inches away from getting into our back door. Most of my friends had flood damage in their house. We definitely lucked out. After the flood, my dad landscaped a creek bed to run the water safely to the front of our fence and through our front yard out to the road to prevent that from happening again. My family did nothing but sit at home and watch local news and the water flow through our yard onto our mostly-flooded street for three days.

I recounted the story mostly because that’s how I felt I should properly address it. Art can definitely help people understand disasters in a way that essays can’t, and vice versa. There’s no way for me to describe a natural disaster that I experienced other than to tell you what I saw, not what news stations or historians told me.

As I am from metropolitan Atlanta, I was drawn to Katherine Taylor’s three part series, Atlanta Flooding. I was struck by the fact that I did not remember the flood at all. The VAC’s description notes that the heavy rains that caused the flood in Atlanta in 2009 also affected Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and Arkansas, but I suppose because I was not aversely impacted, I didn’t make the effort to commit the event to memory.

The first thing I felt when looking at these painting was guilt. I felt guilty that I couldn’t remember an event that apparently caused culvert failure, school closings, and homes to be destroyed less than thirty minutes away from my home. Floods are topics of historic, biblical, and often cultural import, but with modern technology, they are now localized. Unless a flood garners a wide media following, it will rarely cause an outside party to think twice on it. I decided to do research on other floods in my area once I got back to my room, and did not feel guilty that I could not remember other natural disasters. I think the difference between my two reactions was that one event was depicted visually and the others in writing. Visual appeals to emotions can often be more effective at swaying an individual’s opinion than written appeals to reason (this is a crass oversimplification of a complex psychological issue, and there are many exceptions to this notion, but for the sake of space I’ll leave it here).

Why is this significant, and how can students of history benefit from an understanding of this idea? In order to be an informed global citizen, students should recognize the types of appeals texts make. Political cartoons, photographs, and films often inspire more intense reactions than academic dissertations, pamphlets, and news articles. They can lead to riots and play instrumental parts in revolutions. To know that emotion plays a key part in historical events is to be one step closer to understanding those events. In this sense, introspection and empathy are useful. However, too much empathy can lead to bias. For example, when a student is selecting sources to use in a paper, he should keep his own reaction to a text in mind. As Eli pointed out, historians often need to distance themselves emotionally from their topics in order to present a fair and accurate depiction. That’s not to say art should not be used as a source, but that it should be used with the understanding that it can sway a writer or reader without their knowledge.

Were I to write a paper on recent southern floods, I would have to consider the guilt I felt when looking on Atlanta Flooding when deciding whether or not to use it as a source. According to the VAC description, the artist combines colors, painting and drawing techniques, and stains on the paper to illustrate her point that floods are “contradictory” and “distorted.” I could use that analysis to my advantage were I to write a paper on the confusing and distorting effects of floods on southerners, or I could combine this series with other texts in order to make the point that while some southerners think floods are contradictory and distorting, they aren’t as disruptive as they appear. The quality would depend on my own conscientiousness as a writer and on my ability to incorporate other texts effectively. Toeing the line between empathy and emotional distance in a class on disasters will be a challenge this semester, but with this assignment as an introduction, I think it will prove to be a very manageable one.

Tag: Atlanta Flooding

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