The Cape Breton Miners' Museum is set to celebrate its 50th anniversary in two years, but it may not reach the milestone if funds can’t be found to fix the building.

The Glace Bay museum was already showing its age before it sustained heavy flood damage over the weekend. Staff had to set up several buckets in the main office to help catch the water falling through holes in the ceiling.

“If it rains, you can literally get a shower in the administrative offices, the water is coming in that bad,” says executive director Mary Pat Mombourquette. “That’s a real concern.”

Most of the museum’s doors and windows have corroded and Mombourquette says some of the damage is due to a serious ventilation issue.

“What’s happening really is there’s no ventilation throughout the building,” she says. “There’s no air movement and there’s a lot of wetness coming in. The atmosphere inside the museum is not healthy for the infrastructure.”

Mombourquette says there is a long list of repairs at an estimated cost of $1 million. She’s hoping all three levels of government will step in to save the museum.

“We don’t want to lose it or see it go downhill. We want to see it improve, so I think most councillors would be on board, but again, we will refer at the budget, so hopefully by budget time the other acts of government will be involved already,” says Cape Breton Regional Municipality councillor George MacDonald.

MacDonald wouldn’t say just how much the municipality will commit to the museum, which offers guided tours underground led by retired miners, as well as artifacts and information on Cape Breton’s coal fields.

“We’ve proven that it’s probably, in the last year or so, next to Louisbourg and one of the other larger ones, we are one of the biggest tourist attractions around,” says MacDonald. “We’ve proven ourselves.”

Roughly 14,000 people have passed through the museum this year – up six per cent from the previous year. Mombourquette says most visitors are unaware of how bad a shape the building is in.

“That’s on purpose,” she says. “We didn’t want the visitors’ experience to be impacted, so the first changes we made at the museum were all about visitor experience and volunteer programs and getting the exterior looking good.”

The challenge is now getting the funds in place to fix the damage before it gets worse.

With files from CTV Atlantic's Kyle Moore