Treasures spared, but not museum

That had a dramatic impact on the museum because 60 percent of the staff are civil servants, including most curators. One of them, Dan Piersol, suddenly found himself out of work after 25 years.

"If there's anyone expendable, it's got to be museum people," says Piersol, who was curator of prints and drawings. "I feared that and it came true."

Piersol says even as the flooding, looting and chaos that enveloped the city were unfolding in horrifying TV images, he was determined to return. "The more I watched, the more I thought this is not going to work," he says.

Friends, he says, urged him to look for a new job and he did even before his layoff notice arrived. He quickly was hired as deputy director at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson.

"It was self-preservation," he says. "Everyone did or will get to that point."

Piersol also had another bit of luck. When he returned to his New Orleans house in the Bywater neighborhood, "it was dry as a bone" and 30 years of his paintings were not damaged. "It was just astonishing to see everything exactly as we left it," he says.

While Piersol has a new career, some colleagues scattered around the country are in limbo — and waiting to return to their old jobs.

"I can't imagine not being there," says Victoria Cooke, the museum's curator of European painting who is living in New York, working on her dissertation and planning an impressionist exhibition for 2008.

Cooke, who just bought a new house near the museum last year, says it's painful being laid off but she understands. "I have to put my faith in the people who have to deal with this, that they'll find a solution," she says. "That's my hope. I'm trying to be patient."

But for Keefe, curator of decorative arts, these are worrisome days. After 23 years at the museum, he says he thought he had enough seniority to still be working and is annoyed the board didn't give the staff even a few hundred dollars each to tide them over. At age 64, he fears he'll be forced into retirement without a good pension.

"After all these years of service," Keefe says, "you kind of feel, 'Why did I do this?' "

Sullivan, the deputy director, says the museum had to pare its staff to 14 workers and with the doors closed, there's no need for people such as education curators or a volunteer coordinator.

She's also aware there will be permanent losses. "The void is tremendous," she says. "It's hard to replace someone who was a curator with 30 years of experience."

Bullard worries, too, about the obstacles in reopening: Will workers want to return? Where will they find housing? How will his museum compete with other places offering fatter paychecks?