Monster hurricanes scour the landscape, leaving behind a lot less than when they arrived. This can be frustrating if you want to visit attractions along a southern shoreline, unless the attraction is a memorial to a hurricane.
The bad record of big storms may be changing, however, as Americans realize that celebrity-hurricane wreckage can be turned into something postcard-worthy.
According to the Galveston County Daily News, the median of US 90 through lower Mississippi now has 20 “marine-themed” sculptures carved from trees killed by Katrina. The News calls them “one of the state’s top tourist attractions,” and their popularity is spurring Galveston, Texas, to create a half-dozen of their own Catastrophe Trees, left over from the 2008 visit of Hurricane Ike.
Ike’s legacy extends all the way to Racine, Wisconsin, where a sculptor has taken the remains of five of his Galveston statues, all destroyed in the storm, and turned them into a new piece of Racine public art. According to the Racine Journal-Times, the artist described the sculpture as “very representative of the chaos that was going on in my life,” and titled it “The Last of Ike” — although that may be premature, given the piles of storm debris that have yet to be re-purposed.
Wow! Talk about a silver lining from a seriously scary cloud! I’m definitely going to keep an eye out for the Hurricane Katrina sculptures on US 90 when I travel through there next.
Monster hurricanes scour the landscape, leaving behind a lot less than when they arrived. This can be frustrating if you want to visit attractions along a southern shoreline, unless the attraction is a memorial to a hurricane.
July 21st, 2009 at 11:06 am
Wow! Talk about a silver lining from a seriously scary cloud! I’m definitely going to keep an eye out for the Hurricane Katrina sculptures on US 90 when I travel through there next.