It all started with smoke being reported on the 27th, 28th, and 29th floors of the hotel on Tuesday Dec. 27, 2016. This probably sounds serious and it was, but fire-suppression systems had squelched the blaze by the time the Clark County Fire Department arrived on the scene.
The next day, power went out after a sink overflowed in a service area of the Masquerade Tower and caused a fuse to blow; that ignited a small fire that, again, was contained by the hotel’s sprinkler system. Guests from 400 rooms were evacuated via stairway, as the elevators were out of service.
The very next day on Thursday the 29th, smoke was detected in the Masquerade Tower, setting off sprinklers that had the unfortunate side effect of squelching the backup electric generator. By this point the Masquerade Tower went dark and hundreds more guests had to be evacuated.
Late Friday night, power was restored to 120 rooms on floors four through seven, leaving 780 still in the dark. Since the fire and the power outages occurred on New Year’s Eve weekend when the hotel was operating at more than 90% capacity, that left Rio management scrambling to find rooms in other hotels for inconvenienced guests.
Caesars Entertainment spokesman Rich Broome conceded that the rooms taken offline wouldn’t be ready until well after New Year’s Eve — nor would there be any partying in the hotel’s rooftop VooDoo Lounge.
The Rio’s adversity was a bonus for its competition, as many of the displaced guests had to be booked into non-Caesars properties.
Also inconvenienced was the annual New Year’s Eve fireworks display, whose command center was, coincidentally, headquartered at the Rio, though it didn't prove that where there’s smoke, there’s fireworks.
