About The Red and Black (Athens, Ga.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 13, 2014)
Thursday, February 13, 2014 Vol. 121, No. 23 | Athens, Georgia REDANDBLACK.COM The O Red Black Left: The spinal col umn of a fin whale at the Georgia Museum of Natural History Annex on Atlanta Highway in Athens. This particular whale bone had been struck by a boat at some point and then recov ered. It sits in storage with nowhere to be displayed. SCIENCE EXHIBIT Homeless history museum Georgia Museum of Natural History hidden away for lack of show space BY JEANETTE KAZMIERCZAK @sciencekaz A hippo, an elephant and the world’s largest collection of minke whale skeletons — all boxed up and nowhere to go. The University of Georgia is home not only to the State Botanical Garden of Georgia and the Georgia Museum of Art but also the Georgia Museum of Natural History — 11 dif ferent collections scattered around campus and the greater Athens area. “The first thing that anyone says to me is, ‘Where is the museum because I didn’t know we had one.’ That’s all I’ve heard so far,” said Taylor Davis, a senior biology major from Cornelia. “But all my friends are really interested in seeing it and really a bunch of them are asking about going to it and I haven’t dissuaded them, of course, but I just let them know you can go to the back of the Statistics [and Computer Services] Building and see the show room but there’s not much to it because it’s so small.” Davis and Erika Brewer, a senior biology major from Statesboro, work at the museum as interns — helping to maintain the collections of fish, birds and mammals in the museum’s stor age annex. “I was talking with Taylor and Nikki [Castleberry] one day a couple of weeks ago about how it’s a shame we don’t have our own building on campus because the things we have, I feel like students would be interested enough to come without a class just on their own.” Castleberry, assistant curator of the vertebrate collections at the UGA museum, said the problem was space. “Right now we don’t have any where that we could [display a larger portion of the collection]. We would love to and that’s been something the museum’s been trying to push for a PHOTOS BY JEANETTE KAZMIERCZAK/Staff- E WITH CARE A baboon caught in a perpetual screech glared at a gap in the stacks of boxes still left unpacked from Northeastern University’s donation to the museum. long time, and it just hasn’t happened. Funding for any building just has never come through.” The main display space is now situated in the museum’s main lobby in the basement of the Statistics Building near the Physical Plant. The museum would need plenty of space. She said last spring it received a collection of 30,000 land and 1,500 marine mammals from Northeastern University in Boston, nearly doubling the number of ani mals they had previously. The ware house annex on Atlanta Highway where the collection was unloaded last year is still stacked full of boxes Above: Taylor Davis (left) and Erika Brewer (right), interns at the Georgia Museum of Natural History, work to fit boxes of speci mens back in numeri cal order. They have help catalogue and organize the stacks of collections donated by Northeastern University. that have yet to be processed by Castleberry, other curators and an assortment of interns. “Natural history museums should be seen as a window into time,” said Byron “Bud” Freeman, director of the museum. “We can’t go back to the 1800s and collect those birds that we got from Northeastern. And maybe some of the first starlings that dis persed from the initial introduction in New York City are in that collection. There’s no way to go back in time except through a museum.” See MUSEUM, Page A7 RECOVERY Bowman’s progress taking time BY MICHELLE BARUCHMAN @mlbaruchman It has been almost a year since Emily Bowman was nearly killed in a hit-and-run accident, and she has yet to speak or walk. But her progress is marked in baby steps. Bowman, a former Kennesaw State University student, was walking with a friend in the early morning of Feb. 16, 2013 near Oak Street when 23-year-old William Heaton struck her with his truck. She spent weeks in a coma, months in hospitals and suffered traumatic injury to her brain. Though doctors weren’t sure if she would ever make a full recovery, her friends and family said it seems like every week she is making progress. Debbie Mullins Bowman said her daughter has made at least a good 30 percent, maybe 40 percent improve- A Although progress is slow, Emily Bowman is recovering. Courtesy Debbie Mullins Bowman ment. “I don’t know if we’re halfway there or not,” Debbie Bowman said. “I know we still have a lot to do.” Despite her inability to walk or talk, her year in recovery has been marked with some significant mile stones. Emily began communi cating with her eyes, by blink ing for yes or no. Then, she started moving her right hand, and showed one or two fingers for yes and no. Now, her mother said, she has gained head control and is able to nod up-and-down or side-to-side for yes and no. See BOWMAN, Page A3 WEATHER Ice brings lasting dangers with second storm BY NICHOLAS FOURIEZOS @nick4iezos The winter storm hitting Athens Tuesday and continued through the week, which fell in sheets of icy rain, sleet and snow, has been his toric. The possibility for ice accumulation as well as the widespread damage it could have on Georgia’s infrastructure are momentous in Georgia's weather history. It is the most wide-ranging ice disaster since a storm on January 2000 caused severe damages in almost every part of the state, according to the National Climatic Data Center’s Storm Events Database. That storm, dubbed “Ice Jam 2000,” by About North Georgia, peaked with a quarter to a half-an- inch of ice — bad, but diminutive compared to the .51 to .75-inch ice accumulation the National Weather Service predicted in Athens and Atlanta for Wednesday’s storm. “This is probably something like a once-in- 25-years storm,” said Pam Knox, who served as the state’s assistant climatologist from 2001 to 2011. “We moved here in 200, and we certainly have not seen a storm since then.” David Stooksbury, formerly the state’s cli matologist, compared the storm to a 1973 blast that he said left people from Atlanta to Northeast Georgia without power for five days. “The main concern is that it’s already very windy, with gusts of up to 30 miles per hour,” Stooksbury said Wednesday morning. “We’re expecting extremely strong gusts tonight with larger collections of ice on the power lines and trees.” Athenians woke Wednesday to the sound of crackling ice as it accumulated and then fell, amid a constant of rain and sleet. The storm began in the west and has steadi ly moved eastward, leaving a trail of broken lines and power outages in its wake. With knowledge of the upcoming disaster, Georgia Power import ed more than 2,500 utility crews from Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio and Texas to provide supplemental service. Still, the metro-Atlanta area was hit the hardest in Georgia. More than 100,000 Georgia Power custom ers were affected by 11 a.m. with more than 1,000 active outages. Clayton County and Fulton County reported 168 and 172 outages with almost 38,000 and more than 14,000 affect ed, respectively. In the early going, Athens escaped the worst of the storm: Georgia Power reported only two active outages through Wednesday morning. But that was expected to change as the storm continued east. Stooksbury said the storm had been predictable so far. “It’s pretty much panned out the way we have expected,” Stooksbury said. “By the time we are done, a half of an inch of ice is a quite reasonable expectation.” It was the sound of cracking ice which rep resented the biggest fear for local officials: fear that as ice built up, it would weigh down power lines from county to county, and if those lines snapped, so too could the state’s fragile power system. See STORM, Page A2 NEWS, A2 • VIEWS, A4 • SPORTS, Bl • VARIETY, B3 • SHOWCASE, B7 • PUZZLES, B9 An independent student newspaper serving the University of Georgia and Athens Communities Established 1893, Independent 1980 Help us help kids with HIV/AIDS. See our message on the back cover.
