On This Day in 1980: The MGM Grand Fire

On this day in 1980, just after seven in the morning, a fire started in a closed restaurant on the casino level of the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. An electrical fault inside a wall had been smoldering for some time. Within about six minutes flame had swept most of the casino floor, and the fire department confined it to that level in a little over an hour. Eighty five people died anyway, and around 700 were injured.

Almost none of the dead were near the fire. Smoke rose through elevator shafts, stairwells and seismic joints into a tower of guest rooms twenty one stories high, where roughly 5,000 people were staying. Of the 85 who died, 80 died of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide, most of them on upper floors. The casino and the restaurant where the fire began were not sprinklered. Investigators later catalogued 83 separate code violations and design flaws.

Nevada rewrote its fire code within months and required sprinklers in tall buildings statewide, and there has not been a fire death at a Strip resort since. The habit that travels with you is smaller. Smoke moves faster and farther than fire, so counting doors to the stairwell when you check in, and knowing that a wet towel at the door buys real minutes, is worth the thirty seconds it takes. At home the same logic runs through house fire prevention, and the family that has run a fire evacuation drill once moves without discussion.