Hundreds of Historical Items Were Destroyed At The Portage Air Zoo In 2024 Tornado

One year ago to the day, Southwest Michigan was on full alert, as a tornado touched down in Portage and proceeded to cause millions of dollars worth of damage, not only to the landscape, but also to the small and large businesses alike.

One year later, you can still see the damage that the tornado has caused, as cleanup efforts are still underway and business owners are still recovering from all the damage that took place. One of those businesses is the Air Zoo in Portage, which, according to a recent report from Wood TV, had to move over 80,000 artifacts into storage because of the damage that was done to the roof.

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But this inconvenience was minor compared to the damage that was done to hundreds of artifacts of historical origin. They spoke to Troy Thrash, who is the president in CEO of the air zoo, about the damage they suffered:

Everything looked great in the museum itself, but then coming up here and in our education classrooms, you can see the water flooding, immediately, there was obviously great concern over all of these artifacts that you see here.

They went on to talk about how most of the artifacts that were destroyed were made of paper, such as flight logs, manuals, and photographs:

The paper was already really brittle, but then it gets soaked it starts to stick together and so regrettably, that was the biggest loss.

There's clearly no replacing the lost items, but it's good to know that in a time of chaos, the team was able to act fast to salvage and save more than 80,000 in the Air Zoo itself.