Mapping Disaster: The Potomac River Flood of 1936

My initial proposal for my Digital Project outlined the best case, long term form this digital project could take. For my final project, I chose to pursue a more attainable deliverable by focusing on a single decade and single flood event—the 1930s and the Potomac River Flood of 1936. I also chose to develop a StoryMap Journal (check it out!!) to make the project more narrative than a standalone (albeit interactive) digital map might be.

I was super fortunate in that ArcGIS layers for the flood of 1936, the zoning map, and census data for D.C in the 1930s, were already developed by other users. This saved me from having to do the super time-consuming task of marrying raw data and shape files to create base layers of my own. I was able to combine several layers of data: census, zoning, and flood levels, and add locations of flood control projects, to build a narrative of vulnerability and bring the most heavily impacted locations and populations into sharper relief. I provided context for the map(s) with text from the Flood Control Act of 1936, images from the flood event, contemporary news media, and narration. Altogether, this StoryMaps journal is a chapter (or draft chapter) of the history of flooding in Washington, D.C., and by performing a critical reading/interpretation of traditionally top-down sources (governmental records, policy, demographic data, etc.), begins to reveal the longstanding human impact—beyond immediate loss of life—of flood events in the District.

I can imagine a realistic finished digital project for this course taking one of two directions (and would love your feedback on which direction of development you would be most interested in seeing):

1. Sticking with the 1930s and adding more data/maps from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), any personal narratives of the flood captured in news media or hearings of the Senate’s Committee on the District of Columbia. This approach could fill in more details about the impact of this particular flood event and further demonstrate the utility of layering various types of data.
2. Adding information about another decade, likely the 1940s, to illustrate population growth and distribution, modifications in zoning, subsequent flood events, and other flood mitigation projects (if any). The utility of this approach is demonstrating a pattern of constructed vulnerability over time.   

In either case, my final project will include consideration for how a project of this nature might be publicized to the broader public. Further it will include a plan or draft form through which community collaborators might submit stories/firsthand accounts from disaster events within their communities.

Long-term, I imagine this type of digital project becoming a component of my dissertation, that incorporates the sort of data I’ve used here over the entirety of the 20^th century to tell a story about chronic flooding in Washington, D.C. It would reveal patterns of environmental inequality within the built environment of the city, and include oral history accounts of individuals who have experienced these flood events firsthand with the goal of becoming a co-curated project with the potential of achieving tangible policy change.