RED LAKE — The main gallery of the Red Lake Regional Heritage Centre has reopened, nearly four years after the building's roof was blown off during a storm.
About 80 people attended the grand opening at an event Thursday night.
It was the first time the gallery was officially open after a storm ripped off the roof of the heritage centre in September 2019.
Trevor Osmond, the centre’s director, said it’s a relief the main exhibit area is finally open.
“We can go back to some normalcy,” he said, noting the three-and-a-half year journey to get to this point.
Osmond recounted the reason for closure in the first place, a severe weather event which tore off the roof on Sept. 20, 2019.
“A super cell that just stormed in here and it caused epic winds that ended up blowing down a huge swath of trees and it came northwards and took the roof and ripped it off like a sardine can,” he said. ”Luckily, no one was hurt but [the roof] crashed onto the power lines, taking out the power, and doing a lot of damage.
Without the roof, it exposed the inside of the building to the elements.
"Then it rained for the next six weeks. So this caused a lot of flooding. These things are terrible for any kind of artifacts,” he said. “Luckily, we had some people from the municipality as well as our local hockey team — the Red Lake Miners. They came in with plastic sheets, put plastic over our displays, our shelves, our storage area.”
He said through that act of kindness, they were able to save 99 per cent of their collection.
“Without that, it would probably be a near total write off of things,” he said.
Osmond said operations were moved to another location.
“We moved to Balmertown which is 10 minutes away. But moving that much content from one building to another, especially when you can't just throw it in a truck and haul it over, it takes a lot of planning and careful work,” he said.
“Once we got there and set up, of course, we had a pandemic.”
He said COVID-19 meant staff had to do their best to work from home initially and then avoid everybody and work in a warehouse.
“So largely after the stay-at-home order was sort of lifted, we barely noticed COVID because we were so hard at work,” he said. “This has always been a place, a jewel of the community and we're really happy to get it up and running.”
Osmond said he thinks people are going to be really excited about what they see.
“We've put a lot into making [the exhibits] a bit more future proof. The new exhibits are something that can be built off of,” he said. “They're not just created and stay stagnant, they're sort of pieces of living art themselves.
With the main gallery now open, Osmond said they can now revisit other projects put by the wayside for years.
“I can say that we have an exciting newspaper project in the works where people will be able to connect with our local newspaper," he said. “We no longer have one but they'll still be able to look at the back issues and explore them.”
Osmond, who has been at the centre for a decade, was grateful to those who have helped through the challenges.
“Our support network through the Government of Ontario, through the municipality of Red Lake and even through the federal government, we really appreciate all that support and that's helped us go from a disaster to a finished product.”
