Preservationists rush to save city's history
Professionals are working to salvage about 6,000 bound volumes of more than two centuries of property transactions in Orleans Parish -- about 10 percent of all the books in the Notarial Archives -- that were under 3 feet of water in the basement of the Civil District Court building on Loyola Avenue.
Concern mounted because archivists weren't allowed inside for more than a week after the storm, prompting Shelly Henley, immediate past president of the Society of Southwest Archivists, to sound the alarm in a letter to editors of several newspapers.
Without professional help, the documents "will soon be unrecoverable," she wrote. "New Orleans, a city so rich in history, may soon become a city with no history."