"It Was Death, Absolute Death"

By James Kelly

Fiery disaster for the tourists in a Las Vegas hotel

It started shortly after 7 on Friday morning as smoke drifted through the glittering casino on the first floor of the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. Within minutes the world's largest gambling hall--a 140-yard stretch of roulette, blackjack and dice tables and 1,000 slot machines--was engulfed in flames. The fire raced through the entire ground floor of the 2,076-room hotel, one of the largest in the world, destroying two cavernous, 1,000-seat showrooms, an arcade of 40 shops, and five restaurants. "Flames were shooting out the entrance," recalls Theresa Ricky, the assistant bell captain at Caesars Palace, who arrived at work across the street at 7:30 a.m. "Smoke was coming out of every crevice."

The smoke, not the fire, did the damage, billowing in thick black clouds up the air ducts and stair wells, trapping guests on the upper floors of the 26-story structure. At week's end, the death toll had reached 83, and at least 334 were injured; officials feared that the number of deaths might climb higher still. Said Las Vegas Fire Chief Ray Parrish: "People tend to hide when they get afraid, so it may be a day and a half more before we can arrive at a final figure." The MGM Grand Hotel fire is the second worst such blaze in U.S. history, surpassed only by the Winecoff Hotel disaster in Atlanta in 1946, which killed 119.

Though the exact cause of the blaze remained to be determined, investigators decided that it started in the kitchen of the ground-floor delicatessen. James Kalb was across the street when the conflagration broke out. "I heard this great big explosion toward the front end of the casino," he said. "Then I saw this big mass of flame, about 100 feet in diameter." Pandemonium surged through the casino, which stayed open 24 hours a day, as the flames roared up through the catwalk called the "eye in the sky," used by the management to monitor gambling. The early-morning patrons fled.

Though the blaze never spread above the second floor, it apparently knocked out the telephone switchboard and the fire alarm system. The 4,500 guests in their rooms thus received no warning. Those still sleeping were awakened, one by one, by screams and choking smoke. Says Keith Beverton of Woodland Hills, Calif.: "I opened my hotel room door and people were shouting, 'What should we do?' It was death, absolute death there. I closed the door but the air in my room was so thick I was having trouble breathing."

Panicked guests searched frantically for exits. Some managed to make their way to the stair wells, only to discover thick smoke or, worse, that once they had started down they found the doors locked on the stair well side as a security precaution. Others were caught in the hallways. Said Fire Department Captain Ralph Dinsman: "If they'd stayed in their rooms until we got to them, a lot of the dead would have survived."

Many on the upper floors fled to the hotel's roof, while those still stranded in their rooms crowded onto balconies screaming for help. Others, seeking fresh air, shattered windows with pieces of furniture. "There was a lot of smoke in the hallway, and you had no idea how fast the fire was spreading," says Pat England, a hotel employee who was on the eighth floor. "It was horrible."

Firemen clambered up rescue ladders and began helping guests from windows and balconies. Since the ladders reached only as high as the ninth floor, dozens of other firemen headed up the stair wells to fetch guests from higher floors and lead them down to safety. But the most dramatic rescues were made by eleven helicopters, nine from nearby Nellis Air Force Base, that hovered over the roof, let down cables and lifted up hundreds of guests.

As the rescue operation progressed, authorities tried their best to calm those guests still stranded in the hotel, some of whom were leaning out of windows and dangling ropes made from bed sheets. "Don't jump! Don't jump!" policemen yelled through bullhorns. A helicopter swooped around the hotel announcing over a loudspeaker in English and Spanish that the fire was under control. Despite the warnings, at least one woman was killed when she tried to climb down a bedsheet rope from the 19th floor, made it to the 17th, and then fell.

Even as the fire still smoldered, troubling questions were being raised about the tragedy. Built in 1973 at a cost of $106 million, the MGM Grand met the require ments of the county building code in effect at the time by installing sprinkler systems only in the basement and on the first and top floors. There were no smoke detectors in the guest rooms. A new code requiring sprinklers on every floor and the use of smoke detectors was passed in 1979.

Said one fire fighter: "More sprinklers would have made all the difference in the world."

The tragedy was made worse by the fact that flames were able to destroy the alarm's control system before it could go into action. In addition, open stair wells funneled the smoke upward like chimneys. Nevada Governor Robert List called the hotel "a burned-out devastation. It turns your stomach." And he added: "The repercussions from this fire will be long-lasting."

Reported by Gavin Scott/Las Vegas

With reporting by Gavin Scott

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