INNISFAIL – The town’s much-maligned Blue Bird Motel has encountered more misfortune.
On the night of Sunday, April 7 the Innisfail Fire Department received a call at about 7 p.m. that there was a fire in the motel’s abandoned stand-alone diner located on the east side of town along 42nd Avenue.
“There was a fire in the mechanical room of the Blue Bird diner,” said Gary Leith, chief of the Innisfail Fire Department. “The mechanical room was heavily involved in fire. Smoke had spread to the rest of the building.
“We extinguished the fire with only minor damage, and there was heavy smoke damage,” he said, adding it took firefighters from two engines 20 to 30 minutes to put out the fire. “We were probably on scene for another hour.”
Leith said there no one was in the diner when firefighters arrived at the scene.
“We suspect it was deliberately lit. RCMP will deal with that. There are no suspects at this point,” said Leith.
He acknowledged the abandoned diner, which was last used for dining service about five years ago, was boarded up prior to the blaze.
Leith said the out-of-town owners of the building are expected to be in Innisfail this week to secure the crumbling diner.
The motel, which is more than a half-century old, has been heavily criticized in the past by civic leaders, including RCMP, for violence and unruly behaviour by tenants and visitors.
Out of town owners have pledged in the past to clean up the motel's image to make it more acceptable to the public.
The latest fire at the 50-unit Blue Bird Motel follows a more devastating one on Dec. 20, 2021 when 20 firefighters from the Innisfail and Red Deer County fire departments were notified a blaze had broken out in the northeast building of the motel complex.
Three of the building’s eight suites were heavily damaged, while the remaining five sustained moderate damage.
The Town of Innisfail’s FCSS staff connected impacted tenants to appropriate resources for emergency housing.
The northeast building has since been restored.
