Prairie Pride Motel destroyed by fire
May 24, 2019, 3:47 am
Kara Kinna
Moosomin’s Prairie Pride Motel located on Broadway Avenue was destroyed by fire in the early morning hours on Sunday, May 12.
Rob Hanson, Moosomins’ fire chief, says the Moosomin fire department was dispatched to the fire at 12:55 am on May 12.
He says it appears the fire started in one of the rooms in the motel and spread through the roof.
“The room where the fire started was fully involved,” he says. “It was already through the roof. It was one of the rooms, and it just spread through the roof because it was a common roof. So it spread the whole length of the building. It was pretty much fully involved by the time we got there.
“We suppressed it as best as we could and then we had a town trackhoe brought in and ripped the tin off the roof, and then we used our aerial truck to put everything out from above.”
Hanson says there was no one in the building at the time of the fire.
The fire commissioner and SGI were out to look at the fire last week.
Investigation into the cause of the fire is still ongoing, and as of last week, the cause of the fire was still undetermined.
Prairie Pride Motel is owned by VMK Logistics Corporation. Raj Verma is one of the owners.
He says renovations have been ongoing at the motel, and it has been closed since around mid-April, so there was no one there, including staff, when the fire started. He says staff were checking in on the property once a day, and checked in around 8:30 in the evening of Saturday, May 11 but didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.
“My staff told me he was there at 8:30 or 9 pm in the evening and he said there was nothing unusual,” says Verma.
“I was in White City, I live in White City. The RCMP officer came to my place at 2:47 in the morning. He told me ‘there is a fire at your motel.’
“When the officer told me that night, I could not sleep after that.”
Verma says he has been steadily renovating the property since VMK Logistics purchased it in November of 2018. He said the rooms had been repainted, some of the doors had been replaced, and some of the bathroom fixtures had been replaced.
He says if it’s possible he would like to rebuild the property.
“I’ll have to think about it, but definitely I want to rebuild. I was doing good business, I was busy, but I have not decided yet,” he says.
