25 years ago today----MGM VEGAS fire kills 87

[Grant]

ASSOCIATED PRESS

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Twenty-five years ago Monday, a fire killed 87 people at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas and sparked a clamor for tougher fire codes.

It was the state's deadliest fire and also the nation's second-deadliest fire at the time.

But it took a second Las Vegas fire before state lawmakers passed laws designed to make Nevada's resorts among the nation's safest.

An arsonist torched the Las Vegas Hilton nearly three months later, killing eight people and eliminating opposition to legislation requiring costly sprinkler retrofits.

Despite pressure from fire marshals during its construction, MGM officials fought installing sprinklers - which would have added about $192,000 to the cost of the $106 million resort.

"With sprinklers, it would have been a one- or two-sprinkler fire and we never would have heard about it," said David Demers, co-author of the National Fire Protection Association's report on the Nov. 21, 1980 fire at the MGM.

Eight months later, the MGM was rebuilt and open for business. Sold in 1985 and renamed Bally's, it's now owned by Harrah's Entertainment.

The blaze spurred 1,327 lawsuits against 118 companies, including architects, contractors and suppliers. The companies chipped $223 million into a settlement fund for victims and their families. MGM's $105 million was the largest. No negligence was admitted with the settlement.

Despite the discovery of 83 building code violations, nobody was ever charged criminally in the fire.

A judge appointed local attorney Lou Wiener as "special prosecutor" to determine if any criminal actions had occured.

Wiener died in 1996 without issuing a report. On the 10th anniversary, he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal: "In my opinion, it would have been difficult to convict anyone."

Will Kemp, an attorney on the Plaintiff's Legal Committee that was formed to represent the claims, said the lawyers looked for signs of corruption in connection with the fire.

"There was no indication of payoffs," he told the Review-Journal. "Believe me, we looked."

He said the late Fred Benninger, MGM chairman at the time, "made the decision to pull the sprinklers."

Before the hotel opened, letters addressed to Benninger from the Orvin Engineering Co. warned that "the liability of all the unsprinklered areas in this building should be a concern to your corporation."

But Las Vegas attorney Steve Morris, who was the MGM's local counsel, defended Benninger - chairman of the MGM Mirage at the time of his death in 2004.

"This wasn't a case where the MGM people intentionally built a defective hotel to save money," Morris said. "I know how personally agonized he was after the fire ... That fire almost killed him."

But Morris acknowledged: "After the fact we could see things that perhaps should have been different."

U.S. District Judge Philip Pro, who as a magistrate worked on the litigation, said the evidence he saw "suggested negligence, terrible negligence."

[Grant]

Picture of that day