2 months after fire, Ormond Beach Performing Arts Center repair work to begin
Just over two months after a small fire forced the recently renovated Ormond Beach Performing Arts Center to shut down, repairs are about to begin.
The City Commission Tuesday approved a $626,297 contract with Bomar Construction, Inc., a local company, to carry out the necessary repairs. According to the city, the funding will be provided from the "General Capital Improvements Fund and be derived from insurance reimbursement."
On March 11, the city announced that a “small fire” two days earlier had broken out in the center. The building was unoccupied at the time of the incident, and no one was hurt.
Previous coverage: After 7-year renovation, 'small fire' shuts down Ormond's Performing Arts Center for months
The expectation that the center would need to be closed for “months,” as mentioned by the city’s announcement, was confirmed by the center’s supervisor, Marc Schwartz, in an interview this week.
What damages did the Performing Arts Center incur from the fire?
According to Schwartz, the fire started in the center’s auditorium, where more than 500 new seats had been installed.
“It started in the back row, apparently, and about 14 seats were damaged by the fire,” he said.
That activated the center’s fire depression system, setting off sprinklers, which quickly put out the fire.
“But the water continued to run until staff discovered that there had been a fire the next morning,” Schwartz said. “At that point, the water has been shut off, but the water penetrated from the auditorium to the galley area and into an area where properties of the city and of show groups were stored. So there was a significant amount of damage from that water.”
This is why, he added, the repair process will take “some time” to fix everything.
“The water got into dry wall — there was quite a bit of dry wall that had to be removed.”
A restoration company brought on to do the initial cleanup also cleared out all of the stored items that were soaked by the water.
The company put the items in temporary storage units in the center’s parking lot and, “since that time, those have emptied out and the properties have returned to their owners and the things that belong to the city are stored in the backstage area.”
Schwartz said there has not been a determination on the official cause of the fire. He said investigators have collected “a couple of seats out of the auditorium” as well as “scientific evidence that was going back for laboratory analysis.”
“What that has revealed, I don’t know,” he said. “I’m just grateful, more than anything, that no one was here in the building at the time the fire started.”
The state fire marshal is investigating.
A blow after 7-year renovation process
The center had just reopened in February, weeks before the fire, after a renovation process that took about seven years.
“There were about five shows and then it was only about three weeks (until the fire),” Schwartz said.
The center’s reopening weekend, from Feb. 16-18, featured an invitation-only, black-tie gathering, a live performance by Victor Wainwright and The Train, and a free public tour of the building so residents could see the new features.
PAC reopens: After years of planning, Ormond Beach Performing Arts Center to reopen with new look
Schwartz said there is no exact estimate of how long the repair work will take, but he is “hopeful” that the center can reopen “later this year, or at the very latest early next year.”
“It takes a lot of people and a lot of time to make something like this happen,” Schwartz said of the renovation process. “Because of that effort and because of the beautiful renovations done, everything is going to happen to make sure that when we do reopen, that it will be just as beautiful as it was after the renovation.”
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Ormond Beach Performing Arts Center repair work to begin after fire
