"A New Year We'll Never Forget"

By Amy Wilentz.

In just a few hours, New Year's Eve festivities were to begin at the Dupont Plaza in San Juan. The hotel's 423 rooms were filled, and every table in the penthouse restaurant had been reserved. It would be, predicted Howard Puig, assistant manager of the hotel's disco, "the night of the year." On the mezzanine, gamblers were already crowding into the posh casino. Through the large picture windows they could see the pounding surf and a clear blue afternoon sky that seemed to bode well. As bettors hunched forward for yet another round of blackjack and croupiers gave the roulette wheels an added spin, there came a whisper: "Smoke." Nobody paid any attention.

Then, out of nowhere, thick black clouds and the crack of two or three explosions. "A ball of fire came through," said Croupier Susano Gonzalez Perez. "It blew open the door. People were trampled." Some raced toward the picture windows, grabbed chairs and hurled them through the thick plate glass, then jumped 30 ft. to the ground. Bathers near the pool where other survivors landed fled from the spray of shards. Many huddling near the casino's closed door, apparently unable to pry it open, died of smoke inhalation. Others farther inside perished immediately; rescue workers found their charred corpses sitting upright in chairs around the blackjack tables. The terror did not end on the mezzanine. Smoke poured out of the lower floors and wrapped the 22-story building in a dense cloak. On the twelfth floor, Nancy Brensson, 12, of Cresskill, N.J., was watching a rerun of The Carol Burnett Show while her mother was taking a shower. "Suddenly the room went dark," she said. "I looked out and saw this cloud. My father said that it was probably rain. But he opened the balcony door, and smoke rushed in."

The Brenssons ran for the stairwell, only to be met by other panicky guests and a thick wall of smoke. "We rushed back up," Brensson said. The family climbed onto the 20th-floor balcony that encircles the hotel. There three men helped lift them and others onto the top of the building. Throughout the late afternoon, six helicopters hovered in the air, plucking survivors from the roof.

By week's end the death toll had reached 95, and at least 106 people were injured. That made the Dupont Plaza inferno the second worst hotel fire in U.S. history, surpassed only by the Winecoff Hotel blaze in Atlanta in 1946, which killed 119. Most of the victims died in the casino, and the rest were found in hallways and rooms on the first four floors.

. Days after the tragedy, investigators were still searching through the rubble, looking for clues about how the inferno started. Fire officials labeled the blaze suspicious and raised the possibility that it had been set by disgruntled union members engaged in a bitter wage dispute with the hotel. But the latest evidence, according to Puerto Rico Governor Rafael Hernandez Colon, has led investigators to speculate that hotel security guards may have set the fire in an effort to discredit the union. Said Hernandez Colon: "We suspect there may be arson because of the very tense labor situation that existed."

For the past few months, Teamsters Local 901 and the hotel, which is owned by Hotel Systems International, of Santa Monica, Calif., had been holding negotiations for a new contract. The union, which represents 290 of the hotel's 450 employees, had threatened to strike at midnight on Dec. 31 if its demands were not met. On the afternoon of the last day of the year, 200 or so union members met in the Dupont Plaza's ballroom for more than an hour and voted to allow their leaders to call a strike. "The next we know," claimed Attorney Rudy Torruella, the hotel's negotiator, "is that immediately a fire broke out in the ballroom. In attempts to put out the fire by going through the kitchen door to the ballroom, ((hotel employees)) found that a door was barred, barricaded from the inside." Nonetheless, Torruella refused to speculate about who might have started the blaze. "I would prefer to speak just of facts. The fact is that the fire broke out in the ballroom."

Union officials angrily denied any role in the disaster. Jose Cadiz, Local 901's secretary and treasurer, pointed out that at least three union members had perished and offered a $15,000 reward for information leading to the capture of arsonists, if indeed arson was involved. Though he acknowledged there had been tensions between union workers and the hotel, that was putting it mildly: since late December, the union had been airing spots on local radio stations urging people to stay away from the Dupont Plaza on New Year's Eve. Cadiz explained that the ads referred merely to a possible curtailment in services at the hotel. He also said that after the ballroom meeting ended, he remained confident that an agreement would be reached by midnight.

Most investigators agreed that the conflagration began in the ballroom under the mezzanine-level lobby and that subsequent blasts, perhaps caused when the fire hit kitchen gas lines, propelled the flames up into the casino. There were unconfirmed reports that three explosive devices had been found. And in the days preceding the tragedy, several small suspicious fires had broken out.

Arson or accident, survivors complained bitterly about how the hotel had responded. According to eyewitnesses, no alarms were sounded and no public- address announcements were made. Survivors were also unhappy with evacuation procedures that were confused or nonexistent. Others said the gaming hall's manager had shut the casino's doors when smoke first wafted into the room. But Croupier David Corrasquillo argued that his boss had the doors closed to keep out smoke, not to keep in money. The manager, Santiago Torres, died in the blaze.

The Dupont Plaza had no sprinkler system; it is not required under local law. Puerto Rico is hardly alone in its failure to insist on the devices. In the U.S., guidelines vary greatly from city to city; Nevada, Florida and Massachusetts are the only states that make installation in all hotels mandatory. Governor Hernandez Colon has now promised to seek a law directing the island's hotels to install sprinklers.

Fire fighters were hindered by the hotel's layout. Its extra-wide mezzanine and its ground floor, which accommodated the ballroom and two restaurants, made it difficult for trucks to get close enough to use their aerial ladders to rescue guests. According to Richard Henderson, a South Carolina chemist and arson expert, many hotels have adopted this design in recent years. "For those on the upper floors," Henderson said, "stairways are about the only shot they've got to get out."

The Dupont Plaza fire is likely to have other, more mundane repercussions. This winter's season was expected to be the best since Puerto Rico's tourist industry went into decline about a decade ago, and the island's officials fear that vacationers will now stay away. "This is the first time we have had such a tragedy," said San Juan Mayor Baltasar Corrada del Rio. "I am sure that ((tourists)) will not allow this sort of thing to have an impact."

Perhaps. But the scenes of blood and bodies and panic will be etched forever in the minds of those who witnessed or survived the horror. As the rescue operation progressed into the night, New Year's Eve celebrators from nearby hotels, wearing party hats that looked strangely forlorn, wandered by the Dupont Plaza. Standing in water from the fire fighters' hoses, they stared at the blackened hotel. The next morning Monsignor Thomas Maisonette came to give the dead the last rites. "It's such a terrible mess in there," he said as he departed. "It is not easy to tell what is debris and what is human remains." And Pat Lo Grasso of Lodi, N.J., who was staying at the hotel, will remember screaming for her children and crying until she found them. "This is a New Year we'll never forget," she said as she headed home.