It’s just two weeks into 2018, but it’s already been quite the eventful week Merriweather Post Pavillion. Since 2015, plans to renovate the classic shed have been in the works, centered predominantly around raising the pavilion’s roof from 33 feet high to 53 feet high. Builders have been hard at work executing these plans to prepare for a busy 2018 summer concert season. Early last week, the venue posted an image showing the old roof and the new roof side-by-side as seen from the same spot lawn. The caption jokingly asked if the reader could notice anything different. The drastic upgrade (coupled with circulating rumors of some summer Phish tour dates at the venue) immediately sparked excitement among music fans. [Note: The post containing the comparison image of the raised roof has since been removed, thanks to Scott Kennedy for saving the photo].

However, the beautiful buzz of MPP speculation was critically harshed Saturday morning, when the venue gave word via Twitter that the raising of the roof had hit a little snafu–that is, the whole damn thing collapsed overnight due to extreme winds. You can read the venue’s accounting of the roof collapse in the image below:

As the statement notes, nobody was hurt in the incident. The venue will rebuild and still plans on being ready for the opening of the summer concert season. In fact, they are choosing to look for the silver lining in the situation. Rather than raising the old roof, they will now build a brand new one specifically suited for its new specifications. And, as the MPP statement jokes, they’ve now got a head start on building a new roof: they get to save a bunch of money on demolition for the old one.

While this turn of events is shocking, issues resulting from these new MPP renovations were not totally unforeseen. The plans were met with skepticism from local residents since their announcement in 2015. As local Maryland resident Carol Galbraith told the Baltimore Sun when the proposal was revealed, “Based on past performance and unresponsiveness during the summer to complaints about noise, I’m deeply distrustful of Merriweather and its owner, Howard Hughes. Just glancing at the new projected roof; I’m not an acoustical engineer, but [the sound level] is so bad the way the roof is now, raising it higher is going to, from what I can see, only make it worse. It’s designed to shoot the sound out to more people [who sit] up there [at the back of the venue].”

Howard Hughes representative Brad Canfield also addressed resident questions and concerns regarding the 50-year-old venue when the plans were announced, saying he wants to respect the shed’s storied history and “do right by Merriweather.” Explained Canfield of the renovations in 2015, “We wanted to keep the character of Merriweather alive…This was actually a working farm from the 1800s to the mid-1900s. Not many changes have happened since [its opening]. We finally are ready to put shovels on the ground and redo Merriweather.”

We’re thankful that nobody was hurt, and hope that this scary circumstance implores those involved with the renovations to take extra precaution with the construction of the new roof. We love Merriweather, and hope that fans from all over can continue to safely enjoy concerts there for years to come.

[h/t – Baltimore Sun]