ORLANDO, Fla. — The Randall R. Tuten Orlando Fire Museum is reopening Saturday, about three months after it closed to repair water damage caused by Hurricane Nicole in 2022.

“Water came through the brick and damaged our photos. We also have a lot of damage or rot on our interior windows,” said museum President Mitch Peavey, while pushing on a window frame.

As Peavey stepped through the doors of the Orlando Fire Museum, it was like stepping back in time. The museum is housed in the city's original Fire Station 3, which was built in 1926.

“It’s nice to be back,” Peavey said.

He became a firefighter right out of high school, and he said he feels the city’s history, along with his own, seeped into the museum's walls.

“I found myself one night fully bunkered out, holding on to the truck bouncing down the road, column of smoke and fire in the back," Peavey said. "We were going to a really nice fire — well, a bad fire for some people — and I said, 'I am home. This is it.' I was in love, so that is what I did for 34 years.”

Once he retired, he wasn’t ready to leave the fire service behind.

“Our museum is probably one of the better museums in the nation, because you can go to Boston, you can go to New York or some other big city, and they have a lot of apparatus, but those apparatus they acquired — they didn’t operate them," Peavey said. "Everything in this museum was bought by the city of Orlando and used by the city of Orlando.”

While he saw operations change over the course of his career, the collection at the fire museum spans beyond that, with displays that include the city’s original horse-drawn fire engines from the 1800s. The museum even has one of the city’s first pull station alarms from the 1920s. 

After months of repair work, the museum is finally ready to welcome back visitors.

“The amount of history we have here, not just fire department history but city history, it can’t be bought," Peavey said. "Once it goes away, it is gone."

He said he is confident that the museum and its stories will help inspire the next generation of firefighters.

“It just is fulfilling when you teach somebody, or you show somebody things," Peavey said. "You just get a feeling you can’t get anywhere else. When their eyes get big, your heart swells. It is just amazing.”

Anyone who would like to check out the museum, the reopening celebration runs from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday and is free. After Saturday, tours can be scheduled by reaching out to volunteers on the museum's website.