As I visit these sites, I cry, pray, and think about those that suffered. I think about those that died and those that survived. I think about the community and how they have recovered from the event. I take time to honor those who responded to the event.
I began to think about memorial sites in our own state and I hadn’t heard of any other than the USS Kidd or the Katrina memorial in New Orleans. I started looking for books on monuments/memorials that honored a disaster in Louisiana and found none. I casually brought up the topic to fellow emergency managers and my students at LSU, and nothing. That’s when I decided I needed to see what was in “my own back yard”. That’s when my research began.
I have spent approximately 4 months researching the different types of disasters that have taken place in Louisiana and digging through old newspaper articles to collect all of the critical information: what happened, how many died, how many were injured, was there a monument/memorial erected in honor of the event. The database is now up to 178 events that have occurred in Louisiana. Ironically enough, there is a monument dedicated to the memory of those that died from the Yellow Fever outbreak, an obelisk with an angel, located right here in Baton Rouge. At the site of the obelisk, there are over 100 nameless victims buried from the 1878 outbreak. The dedication on the base states: Lest We Forget; The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878.Please join me on my journey to document Louisiana's Forgotten Disaster Monuments.
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