The dehumidifier — a staple for many a home and business. Purchased at big box stores, they run in our basements, in the corner of shops, reducing the water vapor in the air, to protect our property.

Until they don’t.

On Sept. 10, one of two dehumidifiers in Shullsburg’s Badger Mine and Museum malfunctioned, and burned and burned for hours, filling the facility with toxic black smoke, and covering anything not encased under glass with a black soot.

Fortunately, the smoldering fire was limited to the northeast corner of the museum, scorching a small section of wall, and damaging a canvas with an image of circus that once visited the community.

“We are lucky it didn’t burn down,” said Mayor Verne Jackson. “It was a serious loss for the city,” he added about the mess left.

However, most of the hundreds of items that were in the museum are coated, sometimes on the inside and out, with a toxic plastic soot. That soot also hangs in the air of the facility.

To clean all of this up? On Monday, the Shullsburg City Council heard from specialists, their engineering firm, and their insurance company and got the estimated price tag — over $1.6 million.

In a conference call via Microsoft Teams, the council heard from Lisa Singer, and adjuster with EMC Insurance, which holds the policy over the city’s buildings, to find out the options the city had to clean up the museum.

Singer told the council that the city could move forward with getting the collection at the museum cleaned, but needed to make sure to not touch and preserve the corner of the facility where the alleged dehumidifier sits.

The dehumidifier in question is a model manufactured by Gree, which was sold at numerous do-it-yourself stores.

“That area cannot be touched until Gree has a chance to joint investigate this,” Singer shared.

It is not the first time a Gree dehumidifier was involved in a fire like this in southwest Wisconsin. In July 2023, the Republican Journal’s sister publication, the Fennimore Times, suffered a similar fire in the basement of the building for its offices, coating the interior with a film of soot as the dehumidifier burned through the weekend, which required moving out of the building for weeks, extensive cleaning of property onsite, cleaning and repainting of the walls, as well as the replacement of such things like the drop ceiling tiles in the entire office.

Having sat for a half a month with the collection coated, the council wanted to see how to move forward with restoring the collection.

Several officers of the cleaning and restoration firm CRDN spoke with the council, led by Paul Cousineau, Vice President of the Large Loss Catastrophe Team.

Cousineau went through the process, if they were selected. A team could be in place within 72 hours, with people there as soon as 24 hours from the approval, and they would begin removing surface soot from the collection.

The items would be bagged, and then taken to one of their facilities in Wisconsin  to be further cleaned and restored. If an item could not be cleaned and restored to its original condition, they would asses what could be done to a given state, and then the items could be held in storage until the museum was able to be reopened.

In addition, the team would begin cleaning the air in the building, using air purifying systems that would run in the nighttime hours, using a mix of hydrogen peroxide and ozone, cleared during the day to allow work to continue inside of the museum.

The process to initially clean, bag, and remove the collection was expected to take 10-14 days, while the total process of cleaning items, including furniture was expected to take six months.

The estimated cost of the project, including bringing in specialists for aspects of cleanup of just the collection? Approximately $1.1 million.

As for the building itself, the council then talked with Steve Douglas and Levi Kaufman of ServPro Restoration Services.

Hughes told the council that his firm would go through each step with EMC to make sure it was covered by insurance, and would look to remove drywall and interior walls, as well as the electrical and HVAC systems, before replacing the walls and utilities with new.

Demolition was expected to cost approximately $155,000, and reconstruction would be another $369,000.

An alternative

Most people from Shullsburg know the story of the 1900 High School Building — the former Lafayette County Courthouse, after voters decided to move the county seat to Darlington, became the school in Shullsburg in 1861. After a fire took the wood structure, the insurance money was used to cover part of the costs of the current school, built in the same location as the previous building.

Could something like that happen again?

Joe Bailie and Bart Neis from Delta 3 Engineering spoke with the city council. Delta 3 is the firm the city uses for most of its capital projects, and the firm has been part of the Badger Park refurbishment project, with those plans looking to be finalized at a special meeting this month.

Part of the Badger Park project was to look at modifying the museum restrooms, installed in 2006 during a remodel, so that they could be used by visitors at the park, given the museum is connected to the sidewalk running throughout the park, thus be handicap-accessible.

Another item Delta 3 was working on was a location for a concessions stand in the park for athletic events.

Neis presented the idea of taking the $550,000 slated for mitigation of the museum, and instead partially or completely rebuilding the museum, to include a concession stand, as well as the handicap accessible restrooms.

Neis said they did not have a price tag for a new museum building, but the funds for mitigation could take them further along and give them a better museum, with those amenities.

Neis kept hypothesizing about the extend of the damage of the building, wondering about the impact of the fire, to which Singer responded that the true impact was the infestation of soot into the walls, and onto the collection.

The fire was extinguished by a fire extinguisher, Singer stated, and that there was no damage from water to fight a blaze.

Neis brought up that much of the original construction for the 1965 structure was cedar, which can capture the smoke.

Singer shot back there are methods to clean and seal such wood.

“I never needed to tear down a building for just smoke,” she said, noting that the issue is what collected in the walls and insulation.

The further downtime a new build would need would not be covered by insurance, as the policy would only cover lost revenue from what was expected to be downtime from mitigation.

Singer stated demolition of the museum would be covered under the insurance policy for mitigation.

However, much of the second half of the Year 2026 at Badger Park would likely only be filled with construction anyway, as the city is planning to have work on the refurbishment of the park, which includes moving the ball diamond east, renovating the shelter houses, replacing blacktop with concrete sidewalks, and other work to begin on July 5, after the annual Independence Day event in the park.

The work on Badger Park is slated to be completed in 2027, in time for the Shullsburg 200 celebration.

Neis hoped to have more detailed plans on a reconstructed museum for the October meeting that would also review the Badger Park plans.

“I think we need to look at this,” said Alderperson Dan Morrissey, who only wanted to move on approving cleaning the collection. Morrissey suggested that if CRDN was hired, once their work was complete, city crews could explore how much walls were impacted, so they could further look at the options for the building itself.

“Let’s get the stuff out of there first,” Jackson concurred.

The council approved hiring CRDN.