WWW arkcity.net

By FOSS FARRAR
Traveler Staff Writer
reporter@arkcity.net

What hotel manager Connie Stevens learned her first day on the job a few weeks ago in Arkansas City was no fire drill. It was the real thing.

Stevens became the new general manager of the Best Western Atrium Gardens of Arkansas City, on April 7. Just as she was driving home that evening, she was called back by someone who told her the hotel was on fire.

She knew it was no joke.

"I've been in the business long enough never to assume that when an alarm goes off it's a false alarm," Stevens said Tuesday.

Stevens has almost 30 years of experience in the business, she said. She was director of sales and catering at Best Western Hotel and Suites North, in Park City, and before that was general manager of the Radisson Hotel in downtown Wichita.

That first day in Arkansas City was quite an experience for her, she said, and it set her work agenda for the foreseeable future.

"Our real goal is to get open 100 percent by May 1," Stevens said.

The fire caused severe smoke damage throughout the hotel, but the upper floor of the 2 1/2-story building received by far the most damage.

About 15 guests at the hotel that evening were evacuated safely after the fire broke out in a vacant second-story room at the rear of the hotel. Fire officials blamed the fire on a faulty air-conditioner-heater unit.

As of Tuesday, the hotel had only 20 rooms available for guests. The other 62 rooms need at least some renovation.

Stevens said the entire first floor is ready to open, but it needs the approval of the city's code director, Matt Rowland. He is expected to do an inspection within the next few days.

"We lost a lot of business starting from the night of the fire," she said. "As soon as it happened we had to find rooms at other hotels for our regular customers."

Some of the guests stayed next door at the Super 8 Motel next door to the Best Western. Both establishments are owned by Johnnie and P.J. Parmar.

But Stevens has been in contact with a lot of the regular customers to keep them up to date on the Best Western renovation, she said.

"We can win them back, definitely," she said. "We get calls every day from people asking when when we will be open."

Stevens commended the Ark City Fire Department for its quick response to the fire. She also is pleased with Servicemaster Clean in a Wink, of Wichita, which is doing the cleanup.

The cleaning company's first task was to clear out all the smoke using huge machines that recycled clean air, Stevens said.

Servicemaster also has finished cleaning all lower level rooms, the banquet room and the entryway, said Dennis Clark, the company's job estimator.

Workers brought a bucket lift, or "cherry picker," inside the front of the hotel to clean the ceiling of the atrium. The ceiling now shows no trace of smoke damage.

Draperies, linens and bedding had to be replaced, she said. "We drained the pool and cleaned it, now we are refilling it."

"We are extremely fortunate that the hotel was built so well," Stevens said. "The floor is concrete and every other wall of the hotel is a concrete wall or fire wall."

Stevens said typically a first day on the job at a new hotel involves seeing what the operation looks like. But on April 7, "I ended up learning where all the breaker boxes were and the maintenance rooms."

The fire here was not the first hotel fire she has been involved in, she said. She learned to take fire alarms seriously while working at the former Holiday Inn high-rise hotel in Wichita in the late 1970s.

She was on the top floor of the hotel when the fire broke out.

"A banquet was happening," Stevens said. "The alarm system there was set to automatically alert firemen and they were there before many of us knew what had happened."

She said a fireman approached her, threw a wet towel on her face and told her to get down on the floor. She stayed low as she made her way to the fire escape stairway.

"People tend to think they can just walk the other way when they see a fire and escape easily," Stevens said. "But the real danger is the smoke. People don't know it's not the fire that gets you, it's the smoke."