Sifting the Ashes in Las Vegas

By James Kelly

MGM Grand Hotel disaster kindles nationwide concerns

Tired and dazed, the guests waited to be escorted to their smoke-blackened rooms to retrieve belongings. Passing motorists slowed on Flamingo Road to gawk and snap pictures. Inside, firemen sloshed through the gutted casino, trying to puzzle out how the blaze began.

Such was the scene last week at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, where an early morning fire a few days earlier had killed 84 people and injured more than 700. Though the costs of the damage to the 26-story hotel have not yet been figured, MGM officials do not expect to reopen the building until July. As MGM was hit with the first of a potential flood of lawsuits, a $250 million claim from a group of Mexican tourists who lost 15 of their number, a few answers were beginning to emerge.

The fire was believed to have been caused by an electrical wire that short-circuited above the kitchen of the hotel's ground-floor delicatessen. According to Clark County Fire Chief Roy Parrish, the blaze may have smoldered for at least an hour before spreading to a catwalk on the next floor used by hotel guards to monitor the gambling in the casino. The flames raced along the catwalk and then swept down and back across the casino. Except for the twelve people killed in the casino, most of the deaths took place on the upper floors, when thick, black smoke mixed with poisonous gases from the casino's burning plastic decorations swirled upward through air ducts, stair wells and elevator shafts.

Though fire officials claimed to have found at least one serious fire violation in the hotel--holes had inexplicably been cut in the fire walls near the catwalk, possibly helping the fire spread--the MGM Grand apparently met all other fire regulations. The county building code passed in 1979 required new hotels in Las Vegas to install sprinklers and smoke detectors on every floor, but the MGM Grand, built in 1973, was exempt. The hotel had sprinklers only on the basement, first and top floors. There were no smoke detectors. Said MGM Grand Hotels Board Chairman Fred Benninger of the tragedy: "This could have happened in any large hotel anywhere in America."

Yet fire safety remains mostly a local responsibility. Across the nation, the second worst hotel fire in U.S. history* has kindled questions about the safety of hotels and high-rise buildings in general. There are more than 12,000 hotel and motel fires in the U.S. each year, claiming an average of 160 lives. The U.S. Fire Administration, an arm of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, can suggest guidelines but cannot enforce them. As a result, fire codes vary greatly from place to place. In New York City, for example, hotels are required to have a system of water pumps and hoses, sprinklers on floors below ground level, an alarm system and a watchman on duty 24 hours a day. Even though many New York hotels were built before World War II and thus have thick walls, windows that open and other safety features, Assistant Fire Chief John Fogarty is worried. "We have at least one hotel fire a day," he says. "We're not free from the possibility of a major catastrophe."

Some states (Massachusetts, Washington, Connecticut) and some cities (Boston, Atlanta) have in recent years enacted relatively stringent fire codes. But nearly all, including Las Vegas, have grandfather clauses that exempt existing buildings or require only minor improvements. Miami Beach, for example, adopted a tough code in 1976 but only requires its existing hotels to install, among other measures, manual fire alarms and emergency doors. A team of Miami Beach fire officials is going to Las Vegas to see what lessons the MGM Grand Hotel case holds for their city. Admits Assistant Fire Chief Braniard Dorris: "The potential [for a similar fire in Miami Beach] is there."

Of the five casino hotels in Atlantic City, on the other hand, four were built after the city adopted a tough fire-safety code in 1978. As a result, they have sprinklers and smoke alarms on all floors, elevators that return automatically to the ground floor in case of fire, and outside stairways to allow quick evacuations. Yet no matter how new they are, high-rise hotels--indeed, all high-rise buildings--remain largely out of the life-saving reach of firetruck aerial ladders. Most of them can extend only 90 ft. or so, or as high as the eighth or ninth floor.

Haunted by the memory of the 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire that killed 504 persons, Boston has one of the nation's most stringent fire codes. Every building over 70 ft. tall, for instance, must have a sprinkler in every room, closet and corridor. Just as important, owners of some existing buildings have voluntarily modernized their fire-safety systems. The venerable seven-story Copley Plaza was built in 1912, but its owners are spending $460,000 to install smoke alarms in every room after an arsonist's blaze in 1979 killed two people.

Yet refitting an old building can be twice as expensive as installing the same system in a new one, and owners are usually reluctant to do so voluntarily. Las Vegas fire department officials, for example, claim they have urged the MGM Grand Hotel and other hotels built be fore the 1979 building code to install sprinkler systems and smoke alarms, but to no avail. "Retrofitting of the older hotels has always been an economic tug of war," says Clark County Manager Bruce Spaulding. Perhaps now they will. Says Gordon Vickery, director of the U.S. Fire Administration: "We usually lose people in ones and twos, and the public doesn't pay much attention. It takes a disaster like this one . . ."

By James Kelly. Reported by Gavin Scott/Las Vegas

* The worst: Atlanta's 1946 Winecoff Hotel blaze, which killed 119.

With reporting by Gavin Scott

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.