Air Zoo prepares to reopen after storm damage

PORTAGE, Mich. (WOOD) — The Air Zoo Aerospace and Science Museum in Portage expects to reopen Saturday after staff spent days sifting through artifacts that were damaged by Tuesday night’s storms.

Troy Thrash, Air Zoo CEO, said messages started coming in Tuesday night from people asking if the museum suffered any damage. The first thought for many of those people was the planes, but on the second floor of the museum is something much more vulnerable.

“We have a collection of about 80,000 military aviation and space objects dating back from the early 1900s. And it was in that collection space where above it the roof opened up, and then the water came streaming through,” Thrash said.

Air Zoo ‘saving history’ after storms damage roof, cause flooding

Initially, Thrash sent staff home Tuesday night before the storms rolled in but stayed behind to assess any damage.

After the first round of storms knocked out power, he walked through the museum with a flashlight and noticed that the ceiling of two education labs had been compromised and water was streaming in.

“We had a lot of equipment in here, a lot of supplies and things. But that wasn’t my concern at all.”

Thrash knew the water was coming from above, where the collection was stored.

“This is a space that not a lot of people get to see, because we’ve got some very valuable artifacts in here. When I ran upstairs, even before the door opened, I could hear, inside, water streaming in. And the whole next couple of hours felt like really a fight or flight, recognizing that we are losing history by the second in here.”

By late Tuesday night, a team of approximately 20 museum staffers had shown up to help put up tarps, mop water and pull artifacts out of the space and into a dry area as quickly as possible.

“We are all getting soaked because that one opening turned to two and then three and then four,” Thrash recalled. “Ultimately, we evacuated from this space probably close to 5,000 objects that, I mean, some of which will be permanently damaged or lost forever.”

A lot, though, still has the potential to be saved. The main concern is that prints and textiles are most susceptible to mold, so the Air Zoo is working with a Grand Rapids-based company called Prism to preserve as much as possible.

“They started Wednesday morning taking a lot of these artifacts and taking them up to Grand Rapids where they have special facilities not just for storage, but for preservation, using things like dry ice techniques, even gamma rays, things that we can’t do here,” Thrash said.

Several other museums, including the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., also called to offer up collection specialists to help make sense of everything.

“So much support from all over the country, literally, within 24 hours was really amazing,” Thrash reflected.

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So far, the museum has shipped more than 1,000 artifacts to Grand Rapids for Prism to do an assessment. On Friday, staff continued to move framed prints and other artifacts from the collections room to the main level to make it easier to remove them from the facility. Some artifacts were still laid on tarps to dry out.

“(Prism) is taking the things that they know they need to take to their facilities, because unfortunately, having lost power for 48 hours, we could not control the humidity in any of our spaces. And so there is concern immediately that here, we could not keep them dry or get them dry fast enough, so that’s the kind of work that they’re doing in the short term. And then in the longer term, they’re going to look at all of those pieces and say ,’What needs to be done?'”

It’s unclear at this point what exactly was lost, but Thrash said it includes documents, photographs and papers that were too waterlogged to be salvaged.

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“Some of the photographs were like aerial photographs and things and, you know, that’s really a bummer. However, when you when you see faces in these photographs, that’s when it really starts to hit you. Thinking about these 80,000 objects, I mean, these helmets right here and these uniforms, not just what they are with the stories they tell … the stories of the people who wore them, when they were worn, what went into those missions and things like that, that’s when it really starts to set in that we have to save as many of these stories as we possibly can.”

Thrash said it’s heartbreaking to think about the stories lost, but it serves as a reminder of the Air Zoo’s mission and the importance of preserving history.

“The fact that we were able to band together in this way and then even with the community as time has gone on… we will look back and say this was a really important inflection point in terms of the impact that the Air Zoo has on the community and the global community in terms of that history.”

The Air Zoo is preparing to reopen to the public on Saturday. Engineers have been walking through the building to ensure the facility is safe for visitors.

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