On the 21st of November, 1980, a fire began on the first floor of the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in
Las Vegas, Nevada. Firefighters were quickly in attendance, and through a coordinated effort were
able to contain and then extinguish the flames before they could spread to rooms where guests
were sleeping. Only a relatively small part of the hotel actually burned... but a flaw in the design
of the building meant that 85 guests, many of whom were staying on floors completely untouched by
flame, lost their lives. The MGM Grand Hotel and Casino was built by Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios.
It was intended to be a luxurious resort inspired by the hotel in one of their feature films. And,
indeed, the Grand lived up to its name. The hotel was fitted with
chandeliers and marble statues, and was home to one of the world's largest casinos, 25 bars,
eight restaurants, and its own private movie theater... which would of course screen only MGM
films and features. The building housed a staggering 2,100 rooms laid out across 26 floors.
The lower floors were taken up with restaurants, a convention center and the massive grand casino,
while the majority of floors above that were dedicated to guest accommodation.
When the fire began it did so on the first floor of the building in a restaurant called
The Deli. Subsequent investigation would reveal that the cause of the initial fire
was a faulty refrigerator. The flames, small at first, had time to grow considerably
before they were discovered at around 7:10am. Tim Connor, a maintenance worker at the hotel,
stumbled across the flames as he was checking The Deli for broken tiles.
He immediately called hotel security and then set about trying to fight the fire with a hand-held
extinguisher. After being physically thrown to the ground, twice, by waves of air pressure
and billowing smoke, though, Connor admitted defeat and began to assist with the evacuation.
He made this decision just in time. Just minutes after the fire was discovered
flashover occurred. The flames, feeding on an influx of oxygen, swept through the restaurant
and spread out across the casino floor, consuming the entire space in little more than 20 seconds.
Guests in the casino had just a minute or two of warning - time which several of them used
to gather up their chips and other belongings before running for the exit. While the building
was fitted with a fire alarm system, it was disabled by the fire before it could be activated.
As a backup guests would have been given evacuation orders via a public address system
or via their in-room telephones... but again smoke forced staff to evacuate the telephone control
room before this could be done. Guests in their rooms therefore mostly learned about the fire when
they saw smoke billowing outside their windows, or when they heard shouting and commotion in the
corridors outside their rooms. Some only realized something was amiss when helicopters - drawn by
the huge plumes of smoke rising from the MGM Grand - started circling the building. A few
lucky guests were able to evacuate before the smoke and fumes in the corridors became too
thick to risk it. Those who did make a run for it were faced with challenging conditions: the lifts
were out of action, their cables destroyed by the fire. The interior stairwells were designed to
prevent guests sneaking from one floor to another. Guests could enter the stairwell from any floor,
but could only exit the stairwell at ground level. With smoke permeating the air guests
were understandably nervous to lock themselves in the stairwell, and so in many cases propped
open the stairwell door behind them so that they could flee back to their rooms if necessary.
This had the unfortunate effect of allowing smoke to enter and fill the stairwells much quicker than
it otherwise might. As for those who remained in their rooms their prospects were equally stark.
With the interior of the hotel filling with smoke many looked to their windows for salvation.
Several guests made makeshift ropes out of bed sheets or tried to clamber down the exterior of
the building. Some were successful, managing to scramble down from their floor to a lower,
less smoky, floor from which they could make their escape. At least one guest, however, slipped and
fell to their death. Seeing this, police on the ground shouted for people to stay put in their
rooms and wait to be rescued. A small number of guests were rescued by construction workers,
who risked their lives to travel up in a tiny electric lift and pull people out through
windows. They made multiple journeys up and down the burning building until they'd inhaled too much
smoke to continue. Other guests inside the hotel, desperately in need of air, broke their windows
to allow more ventilation... only for smoke from outside to swirl in and begin suffocating them.
The matter was made worse by helicopters swooping in to rescue people from the roof, with the rotors
creating a downdraft that sent smoke rushing into broken windows. The fire was extinguished within
a matter of hours, never having travelled beyond the first floor of the building.
While the flames had remained contained, the smoke had not. It accumulated on the upper floors,
and it was there - furthest from the flames - that the highest death toll was found. Many people died
in their rooms, with some using lipstick to scribble goodbye messages on their mirrors.
Some people survived by jamming towels around the edges of their doors and keeping their windows
tightly sealed. Indeed, some survivors were totally unaware of the magnitude of the disaster.
Firefighters painstakingly clearing the building one floor at a time
encountered a couple dead in one another's arms in one room, and a couple alive and drinking
tequila to pass the time while they waited for rescue in the next. Many of the survivors from
the disaster were evacuated by helicopter. It was a safer option, with smoke lingering in the lower
parts of the building even after the flames had been extinguished. The dead were carried out as
soon as it was possible to do so. They quickly filled up the available morgue space,
and so refrigerated trucks were brought in to store the bodies until they could be identified.
Treatment centers for the almost 650 injured were set up in other nearby casinos - spaces
which were only reluctantly vacated by the hardcore gamblers who had remained in situ
playing slot machines while the Grand burned across the street from them. In total 85 people
died as a result of the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino fire, 75 of them as a result of smoke inhalation.
An investigation in the aftermath of the disaster revealed not just the initial cause of the fire,
but also a host of regulatory failures. Fire safety inspectors had flagged up a number of
serious issues with the building earlier in the year. At the time of the fire only one in five of
the problems identified had been addressed. There were, for example, no sprinklers in the casino
area or in The Deli where the fire began. These areas had been designed to be open and occupied
24 hours a day, and so didn't legally have to have a sprinkler system, as it was reasoned
that a fire would be noticed and extinguished as soon as it started. Over the years, though,
the usage of these spaces had changed. The Deli was no longer a 24 hour a day eatery
and yet no sprinklers had been installed. The situation had changed, but the systems
in place had not. Furthermore, faulty seals in the hotel's air conditioning system allowed
smoke to circulate throughout the entire building rather than keeping it contained on one floor.
The alarm system had also been out of date and inadequate for a building of the MGM Grand's
size. These were all things which would not have been permitted in a more modern hotel,
but the MGM Grand had been constructed at a time when standards were much more lax. Even
after the fire one governor insisted that it wasn't fair or practical to insist that
older buildings be brought up to codes that didn't even exist when they were built. For a brief time
this was an issue around which there was a great deal of debate... until February next year when
a fire at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel killed eight people. The combined impact of the two tragedies
was enough to overcome any opposition, and it was made a legal requirement that even older buildings
conform to modern fire safety codes. The MGM Grand Hotel and Casino was rebuilt and refurbished,
complete with state-of-the-art alarm systems. It exists to this day, welcoming hundreds of
thousands of guests each year. Thanks to the changes which followed the disaster in 1980,
hotel management feels justified in claiming it to be one of the safest hotels in the world.