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…<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0Molly<\/a>\u00a0shouldn’t feel guilty about not remembering. Some areas of Atlanta were more affected than others.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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”\u00a0U-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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0There’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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Power of Art and Disaster”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,32,112],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-10","tag-atlanta-flooding","tag-disasters-and-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":977,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions\/977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}