It Took a Fire to Change Us
Everyone who was in Las Vegas on the morning of November 21, 1980 remembers what they were doing when they heard that the MGM Grand was burning.
It was the worst disaster in the city’s history, and, at the time, the second-worst hotel fire in the nation’s history. (The 1946 fire in Atlanta’s Winecoff Hotel, which claimed 119 lives, had that dubious honor.) All told, the MGM Grand fire would claim 87 lives. Thursday night had ended normally. At 7:15 Friday morning, a fast-moving fire erupted from the hotel’s deli, racing through the casino and sending toxic smoke through the hotel tower. Most of the hotel’s 2,000 rooms were filled with sleeping guests who, if they were lucky, were woken by shouting and banging.
That day saw heroism — helicopters from Nellis Air Force Base rescuing guests from the hotel’s 26 th story roof, iron workers using their scaffolding to help others out of their windows, the 200 firefighters who battled the blaze. Yet there was also the sense that this tragedy was avoidable.
The fact that the disaster may have been less deadly had there been fire-safety equipment provoked outrage.
“There was no alarm, not a thing, just panic,” guest John Pupich told the Review-Journal. Smoke detectors, fire alarms, and sprinklers had not been required by law when the MGM Grand had been built in 1973. As they stood in 1980, county building codes required all those fire safety features, but the building code was not retroactive, so the MGM only had sprinklers in its theater, kitchen, lobby, basement, and top floor.
This tragedy was also a public relations catastrophe for Las Vegas. The newest, most modern hotel was revealed as a death trap. Certainly images of black smoke billowing from the MGM Grand as guests desperately tried to escape — some jumped or fell to their deaths— were not going to encourage tourists to make travel plans.
National press coverage was macabre. “A Life and Death Gamble at MGM Grand,” read the headline to a UPI wire story. “Gamblers all, some of them bucked impossible odds, betting their lives on the strength of a bedsheet and plunging to a loser’s death,” the article began. Fire Chief Roy Parrish did not help matters when he told a press conference that, all things considered, only one percent of the 8,000 human beings in the MGM Grand at the time perished. When he got on the scene, he’d figured “hundreds” would be dead. News that personal items left behind when guests fled the blaze had been looted added insult to injury.
Within a week of the inferno, several multi-million dollar lawsuits had been filed, as other Strip hotel executives claimed that such a disastrous blaze could never happen at their resorts — though a quick check revealed that many of the city’s high rises lacked smoke detectors, alarm systems, and sprinklers.