No Room at Flooded Inn for a Raccoon : Des Moines: Holiday Inn has been closed since July, when floods devastated Midwest. Its one remaining employee used deadly force to evict an unwelcome guest.

The only guest at the sprawling Holiday Inn South the other night was a raccoon.

The only employee shot him dead.

“I still don’t know how he got in, but I know for sure he didn’t want to leave,” said chief engineer Patrick Rush. “I cornered him in one of the guest rooms and got him with a .22. Then I threw him out back.”

The biggest Holiday Inn in Iowa has been closed since July, when the Midwest was struck by devastating floods. The nearby Raccoon River poured 6 to 8 feet of water through the first floor of the nine-acre complex, ruining 156 guest rooms and trashing the bar, restaurant, kitchen, front desk and everything in between. Estimated damage: about $5 million.

Rush said the 346-room hotel will one day come back to life. But no decision has been made on when that might happen, leaving the hotel one of the great flood’s more spectacular victims.

Crews stripped the lower floor and shuttered the place.

All 120 employees were laid off except Rush, who once headed a staff of eight electricians, handymen and plumbers. His job now is to keep the building stable, answer the phone and kick out unwanted guests.

“I’m the general manager and secretary and security and everything else,” he said. “I’m learning a lot about the hotel business. I’m dealing with people I never had to deal with before.”

One challenge came in January, when the Holiday Inn reservations clerks mistakenly booked 60 rooms. He found out about it when people started calling to confirm.

“I couldn’t talk to some of them, they were so upset,” he said.

They would have understood if they could have seen the building.

Flood debris and gunk was removed from the first floor, along with everything else down to the exterior walls and interior studs. The second floor still has beds and other furniture, but much of it has been damaged by soggy fallen plaster.

The boilers were ruined, so the hotel is using refrigerator-sized heaters to keep the place from freezing up. The natural gas bill is $20,000 a month.

The sprinkler system has been turned off. It wouldn’t work anyway because the water main from the street burst during a cold snap.

Rush constantly patrols the property, as do guards at night, to make sure the heaters are working properly and to check for unwanted guests.

Just after the flood, transients found their way into the hotel and set up temporary quarters, but Rush shooed them away. “We had one guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer,” he said. Criminal trespass charges were filed and there have been no problems since.

“I’m not lonely,” he said. “I miss the other employees and I wish they had jobs. But I’m not lonely. I’ve got plenty to do.”

The hotel’s number is still listed and Rush handles 40 to 50 calls a day. Mostly his answer is: “I’m sorry, we’re not open.”

The building is structurally sound, he said, and hotel officials at first said it would reopen by last October. Then the reopening was pushed back to spring, and now the date is indefinite.

The building was insured but three of the five institutions that hold bonds on the hotel have been taken over by the federal government. All are in the Kansas City area, according to Jane Jankowski, a spokeswoman for the Resolution Trust Corp.

She said unspecified issues have delayed a decision on whether to permit the hotel to reopen. The building is owned by Hotel Corp. of America of Kansas City, whose director of operations, Wayne Heintz, declined to comment.