10 years ago:
Snow collapses
downtown roof
Heavy snow on rooftops 10 years ago this week contributed to the winter of 1996-97's latest Grand Forks roof collapse, this one in a vacant section of the City Center Mall downtown.
Just a few days after several thousand kids took part in an Easter egg hunt in the mall, a 20-by-20-foot chunk of roof on the vacant Myhre's Fashion building - since replaced by Town Square - collapsed late in the evening.
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It shook the walls of The Diner next door and even the building housing Pred's Coats on the other side of the mall.
"Well, people wanted the mall to have a bright, open look, and we sure have it now," longtime downtown retailer Sam Silverman told the Herald. He owned the building and the old Silverman's clothing building next door, which had some water damage because of a broken sprinkler in the Myhre building.
An insurance adjuster told Silverman the water damage wasn't nearly as bad as that to the former Best Store near Columbia Mall when its roof collapsed almost a month earlier.
"We had pumps all ready from the flood," Silverman said. "We thought it was gonna come from the bottom."
- Mike Brue
