Wedded bliss follows near miss

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This article was published 06/06/2023 (1093 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg couple are commending the event planners at Fort Gibraltar, saying they had just 10 hours to move a 110-person wedding to a new venue, a day after a palisade collapsed on the site’s grounds.

Newlyweds Desiree Penner, 43, and Jeff Sinnock, 50, weren’t sure what would happen to months of planning after the walkway gave way May 31, sending 17 school children and one adult to hospital.

Fort Gibraltar is a replica of a North West Co. fur trading outpost. It is owned by the City of Winnipeg but leased by Festival du Voyageur.

“I am also a teacher, so, of course, our first concern was the children, and it was so devastating for everyone to hear the news. And then our second concern was, ‘Well, what is going to happen?’” Penner said Monday.

“I honestly didn’t think it would shut down, I thought, ‘OK, they’re going to rope that area off,’ but then the details started to come out.”

“We live near Fort Gibraltar, and every time I’d drive by for the last year, I kept thinking, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s where I’m going to get married, it’s going to happen there,’” Sinnock added.

Gibraltar Dining Corp. planning staff Shawn Brandson and Connie McKane-Brandson called around 1 p.m. June 1, saying the wedding would not happen at the fort, but they had a new venue available.

The Brandsons met the soon-to-be-wed couple at St. Norbert Arts Centre a few hours later. Soon after, they held their wedding rehearsal.

“This was both of our second weddings, and so we held it together probably better than most, I think, newlyweds would,” Penner noted.

With a wedding scheduled for the next day, there was no time to mull it over. Penner, Sinnock, their five children and the Brandsons got to work.

Penner laughed while recalling a night-time run to a dollar store to buy fairy lights for a white wall at the venue.

“I know my partner Jeff was trying to be so accommodating, he’d said, ‘Oh, no, the black chairs are fine,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, but white chairs would look so much nicer,’ and (the Brandsons) hauled their white chairs from Fort Gibraltar, they hauled their kitchen from Fort Gibraltar, Connie just made sure (of) every little detail. We were changing the menu at 11 p.m.”

Penner said they were told there were several weddings that had to be moved from Fort Gibraltar over the weekend.

However, the couple said the wedding could not have happened without around-the-clock help from the Brandsons — who they worry will lose business after an incident they weren’t responsible for.

“What an unfair situation to be in, and due to what? It’s not rocket science that wood structures need inspections in Winnipeg,” Penner said.

The Brandsons provided a statement Monday, saying they were working on moving weddings scheduled to be held at Fort Gibraltar for the time being.

“Our hearts go out to everyone affected,” Shawn Brandson said. “We are doing our best to find solutions for our clients, which includes moving events to our temporary location at St. Norbert Arts Centre.”

Penner said the couple spent around $11,000 renting the venue at Fort Gibraltar, including a loft area and catering. She’s not sure how much she lost to changing the venue, but guessed around $1,000 of activities planned (such as axe-throwing and outdoor games) were cancelled outright.

“Could we try and wiggle out some of the expenses that we’ve already paid and didn’t get? Yes, we could, but we really do not want to do that,” she said. “Their tip would be worth it, just everything that they did for us.”

Fort Gibraltar is currently closed, and will remain that way until an engineer’s report on the affected walkway is completed, officials have said.

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Penner said she hoped someone would be held accountable for what happened to the 18 people affected. “Somehow, this got missed, and I think that that won’t happen again. I think that it will be really clear to everyone that these safety procedures have to be there.”

Meantime, the pair say their night was a huge success. Important details like the crossword-themed decor (the pair create crosswords for newspapers) and a rented disco ball made it to the new venue — and it went off without a hitch.

“I don’t even know if I would have changed it, if I had the power to change it so that we could have got married at Fort Gibraltar, I don’t know if I would have,” Sinnock said.

“In the sense that we had a wonderful wedding, amazingly, incredibly. I still can’t believe that it was pulled off.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

Every piece of reporting Malak produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.