![]() ![]() “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. “A Life-and-Death Gamble at MGM Grand,” read the headline to a UPI wire story. Yet there was also the sense that this tragedy was avoidable. That day saw heroism - helicopters from Nellis Air Force Base rescuing guests from the hotel’s 26th-story roof, iron workers using their scaffolding to help others out of their windows, the 200 firefighters who battled the blaze. Most of the hotel’s 2,000 rooms were filled with sleeping guests who, if they were lucky, were woken by shouting and banging. At 7:15 that Friday morning, a fast-moving fire erupted from the hotel’s deli, racing through the casino and sending toxic smoke through the hotel tower. ![]() (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. It was the worst disaster in the city’s history, and, at the time, the second-worst hotel fire in the nation’s history. Could the Strip become a model of safety in a post-pandemic world? The response to the 1980 MGM fire might offer some lessonsĮveryone 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. ![]()
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