DC -- Natl Postal Museum -- Exhibit (Case): Disaster: Response and Recovery:
- Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
- Description of Pictures: Disaster: Response and Recovery
June 27, 2007 – January 25, 2008
This exhibition reveals how the Postal Service responds to disasters -- natural or manmade -- that dramatically affect everyday life in an instant. Among the objects representing disaster in two cases are postal keys recovered from the body of sea post clerk Oscar Woody, who perished trying to protect the mail aboard the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Titanic; a mailbox remnant that survived the San Francisco earthquake of 1906; and an envelope postmarked the first day mail service resumed in New Orleans after the destruction of Hurricane Katrina.
Archival film footage of the construction of the Titanic runs continuously.
- Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon
underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
- Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 3.149.233.72 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
- Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
|
[1]
 PMDIS_071211_01.JPG
|
[2]
PMDIS_071211_06.JPG
|
[3]
PMDIS_071211_10.JPG
|
[4]
PMDIS_071211_25.JPG
|
[5]
PMDIS_071211_29.JPG
|
- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- PMDIS_071211_01.JPG: Mail Carton Remnant:
Mail is often flown on commercial air carriers in plastic mailing containers. This container was destroyed when United Airlines Flight 93 was hijacked and crashed on September 11, 2001.
- PMDIS_071211_06.JPG: Keys to RMS Titanic's Mailbags:
To ensure the security and privacy of the mail, the mailbags were kept under lock and key. Despite the valiant efforts of the clerks to salvage the mail as the Titanic was sinking, most of it was lost when the ship sank.
- PMDIS_071211_10.JPG: Personal Effects Bag:
All five postal clerks aboard the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Titanic perished at sea. After the wreck, workers recovered the personal effects of American clerk Oscar S. Woody from his body and returned them to his widow in this bag.
- PMDIS_071211_25.JPG: Mailbox Remnant:
Floodwaters rushing through Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on May 31, 1889, wiped out telephone, telegraph, railroad, and mail lines. Emergency mail routes were established on horseback between Johnstown and nearby cities. Mail across the Mid-Atlantic region had to be rerouted through New York.
- PMDIS_071211_29.JPG: Mailbox Remnant:
On April 18, 1906, an earthquake and subsequent fire destroyed much of San Francisco. The main post office was damaged, but service resumed two days later. For several days after the disaster, portal clerks accepted letters without stamps.
- AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
- Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].
