It has taken six months for southern Alberta’s history-making flood to make its way to a museum exhibit.

And staff at Telus Spark are looking for residents’ own mud-caked or waterlogged artifacts to add to the collection that will go on display this week.

“We’re looking for everything from rubber boots and gloves that cleaned up your basement to maybe a memento that you saved from the mud or something that was damaged by the power of that water,” said Kristofer Kelly-Frère, lead Telus Spark exhibit developer for the flood project.

The artifacts could be put on display in a flood-focused local section of a new travelling exhibit that explores the science behind natural disasters and our human response to living with them.

Nature Unleashed: Inside Natural Disasters was scheduled to come to Calgary before the floods hit. Developed by the Field Museum of Chicago, it will allow visitors to experience the impact of earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and more wild weather through interactive exhibits, multimedia experiences and real specimens.

Objects like street signs from a powerful tornado that killed 11 people and destroyed most of the tiny town of Greensburg, Kansas in 2007 and a clarinet from Hurricane Katrina, one of the five deadliest hurricanes in America’s history, add a human element to the travelling exhibit.

The natural disasters exhibit, which will open on Boxing Day and run until May 4, gives visitors the chance to create your own quake, hear tales from Hurricane Katrina survivors, and experience the roar of a tornado in a surround-sound “tornado theatre.”

Visitors will walk away with “a deeper appreciation for the variety and frequency at which these types of large scale natural events happen globally,” said Megan Douglas, marketing and communications director at Telus Spark.

Telus Spark staff booked the exhibit more than a year and a half ago because they felt that in a province where weather-related events like chinooks, avalanches and tornado systems are common-place, an exhibit on natural disasters would be appealing.

Little did they know how locally relevant it would become.

After rivers in Alberta overflowed their banks in June, science centre staff saw the deluge as an opportunity to include stories and relics from the natural disaster into the exhibit.

“We realized that telling the story of what happened this summer was a really important role for us,” Kelly-Frère said. “Spark is supposed to be a hub for connecting visitors and citizens with experts and we knew a lot of people with the city and the science world who had some pretty amazing information to share.”

The flood portion of the exhibit includes a photo gallery showcasing the devastation of the downpour, a manhole cover donated from the City of Calgary that was blown off during the deluge and interactive elements and graphic panels that allow users to learn about rivers and floods.

The exhibit will evolve and expand as citizens’ artifacts are added, and as the city and province release more data about the June flood, Kelly-Frère said.