About a year ago, Elyse and I visited an abandoned former Days Inn in the Warfordsburg, Pennsylvania area, about twenty minutes south of Breezewood. Since then, we had received reports of a fire at the site in September, which destroyed the motel building. Six months after that fire, we didn’t quite know what the site would look like, i.e. whether the remains would still be there or if it would all be demolished by now, so we went by to check it out.
First thing I did was fly over the site with the drone:
Consistent with news reports, the restaurant was undamaged, but the motel building was toast. I’d say about a quarter of the motel building was still standing, while the rest had burned to the ground. There were also piles of bricks blocking vehicle access to the property, presumably done after the fire.
Following my drone photography, I went up and photographed it with my phone.
The Days Inn sign facing the road is unchanged.
What remains of the canopy now stands alone, as the structure behind it is completely gone.
View down the front of the building, facing approximately west. Compare to a similar view from a year ago.
First floor corridor, shot through the door (we didn’t risk going inside). Compare to how this corridor looked a year prior.
The laundry facility, now out in the open. Compare to how it looked last year.
The west stairs survived, though nothing else around it did. This stair was blocked by a vending machine turned on its side during our visit last year, and from the looks of it, that vending machine is still there.
View of the remains, facing approximately northwest.
Edwards fire alarm horn/strobe, badly melted. Compare to how it looked on our last visit.
View from the back side of the building.
Considering that the building had been abandoned for six years and some change at the time of our visit, and that the remains had not been removed in the six months following the fire, my guess is that the remains aren’t going anywhere any time soon. Meanwhile, the cause of the fire has not been determined, at least as much as I can find. The local newspaper’s coverage of the fire on Facebook has generated a lot of speculation in the comments, though. I suppose that there is one plus side to this fire: all of those employee files that I found sitting in there last year were completely incinerated, so I guess that Jamie Strait and others who worked there can breathe a sigh of relief that their personal information is not hanging out there anymore.
So there you have it, I suppose.