A man is dead after a fire broke out in one of the rooms at Kenai’s Uptown Motel on Sunday. The Kenai Fire Department said it was dispatched to the hotel around 9 a.m. and reported visible flames and smoke on the first floor.
Kenai Fire Chief Jay Teague says the preliminary investigation suggests the fire may have been caused by a cigarette.
“There was ashtrays and cigarettes in the area where the origin of the fire seems to have permeated from,” he said. “So it’s possible that he had gone to sleep and left some smoky materials still burning that caused the fire.”
The fire is still under investigation.
Teague says firefighters found a man unconscious inside the hotel room who wasn’t breathing and didn’t have a pulse. Paramedics tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate the man, later identified as Thomas Conn, born in 1958, who was pronounced dead at the scene.
Teague says the Uptown Motel suffered minimal structural damage as a result of the fire. The fire department traced the origin to a seating area inside the hotel room.
“There was a couple of chairs and a table and it was pretty obvious that the bulk of the char and most damage was done in that corner of the room, allowing us to designate that corner as the point of origin,” he said.
Sunday’s blaze came ten days after a separate fire razed part of the Cannery Lodge, also in Kenai. Teague says crews responded to the property on the evening of Jan. 15 for what they initially believed was an outdoor fire near the property. But when firefighters arrived, they found a two-story laundry facility fully engulfed.
“It was not only a priority of trying to, you know, get ahead of the fire and extinguish fire, but also protect some of the more valuable structures that had yet to become involved in the fire,” he said.
The Cannery Lodge is a sort of compound of buildings on the banks of the Kenai River that includes a restaurant, amphitheater and lodging. The exact cause of the fire is still under investigation, but he says the department is “fairly certain” it started in the laundry building, possibly from a washer or dryer or an electrical malfunction.
“The building had burned so long before anyone noticed to call 911 that by the time we got there, there was not a lot left to dig through or comb through for evidence,” he said.
Teague says the Cannery Lodge is closed for the season, and the property was vacant at the time it caught fire. He says it was reported hours after the property’s groundskeeper had left for the day.
He estimates nine emergency vehicles responded to the lodge property to fight the fire, with five of those vehicles shuttling water into the remote area. Central Emergency Services and the Nikiski Fire Department also responded.
In both cases, Teague says his department notified the Alaska State Fire Marshal, which determines if the investigation should continue. He says both properties are also being evaluated by their owners’ insurance companies. The Salamatof Native Association, which owns the Cannery Lodge, did not respond to a request for comment.
Teague says structure fire risk tends to increase during the winter months, because that’s when more people use stoves, fireplaces or electric space heaters. But he says the two recent hotel fires are anomalies. In general, he says to make sure cigarettes are extinguished before being left unattended.
