WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — The stage is set for the return of concertgoers at the FM Kirby Center in Wilkes-Barre.
"First show back tonight, Lake Street Dive, which is a show that our staff has been really excited about. It's new music to our stage. So, we have a lot of new audience members coming in. We have over 1,000 people coming," said Executive Director Joell Yarmel.
Two weeks ago, the fate of this show was up in the air. Yarmel was away at a conference when she got a call about the Kirby flooding.
"It was about 3:30 in the morning Nashville time, from the fire department in our building, saying that we're taking on water and we're working on getting it turned off," she recalled.
Yarmel received pictures showing the basement submerged in water.
"It was disastrous, it was emotional," she added.
There's more to the basement of the F.M. Kirby Center than storage—the Mohegan Lounge, a bar, restrooms, dressing rooms, and meeting spaces filling more than 11,000 square feet.
The Kirby Center estimates more than 400,000 gallons of water filled this space.
"And we had several dumpsters of memorabilia of parts of our building just trashed," said Yarmel.
After two weeks of sanitizing, gutting, and making sure all of the electronics in the basement were functioning properly and safely, shows are able to come back to the center.
But the return is bittersweet as there is still a lot that has to be done.
"Our staff, our community take great pride in this beautiful building. So, to walk through and see the carpets all picked up, to see walls knocked down, to see our beautiful dressing rooms that were just completed in 2019, completely destroyed. It was hard. We knew how much work we had ahead of us," said Yarmel.
The first priority will be to rebuild the dressing rooms for the acts coming to the city this holiday season, and the work around this level will continue from there.
