Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Deadly blaze ‘hell on earth’
Disaster led to sweeping safety reforms
NOT long after the fire burst out of the deli, sending columns of thick black smoke shooting up inside the MGM Grand hotel tower, then-Nevada Gov. Robert List arrived at the flooded casino floor to survey the damage.
It was dim, and the debris was blackened and torched. Bodies were on the ground or slumped over gaming tables and chairs. The scene was nightmarish: “It was hell on earth,” he recalled.
“That time in that casino is etched into my memory just like a tattoo that would never come off,” said List, 84. “It was just
tattooed in my mind: that terrible smell and the blackness without color, and the bodies that were there. It was awful.”
Other memories can fade with time, so after the devastating fire, rookie Clark County fire Capt. Jerry Bendorf dictated personal recollections to his wife to type. He said he had done so to remember specific accounts of his experience to tell his children and grandchildren.
Bendorf, 75, recalled sitting against the wall in a lobby as he watched other fire personnel give CPR to victims and thought about how he could relate to Hollywood’s depiction of the fog of war.
“I didn’t feel like it was me there,” he said. “I kind of thought to myself: This is like being in a movie or something. It wasn’t real.”
He was just one of more than 200 firefighters who responded to the catastrophic MGM Grand fire in 1980, the worst blaze in Las Vegas history. It killed 87 people and injured hundreds more inside the Strip property, changing so much about the valley 40 years later.
Past and present
The tragedy on Nov. 21, 1980, sparked by faulty wiring in a deli restaurant at the east end of the casino, revealed code violations, design flaws and other serious vulnerabilities in one of the most modern resorts. Coupled with the deadly Las Vegas Hilton blaze three months later, the two fires led to public policies that upgraded fire safety standards in high-rise buildings throughout the state.
More than 1,350 legal claims stemmed from the deaths and injuries at the MGM Grand, paving the way for a $223 million settlement. The result of the massive litigation in the valley, which did not have enough firms at the time to handle the workload, is that talented attorneys arrived and grew firms over the next few years, significantly expanding the legal community in Southern Nevada.
“Pretty much everyone in town was working on the case,” said attorney Will Kemp, 65, who represented plaintiffs. “And if you weren’t working on it, it was because you didn’t want to.”
But as much as things changed in the aftermath
of the fire, it remains as relatable as ever: The Route 91 Harvest festival shooting similarly prompted large-scale legal action and an even bigger award to plaintiffs from several states, and the Alpine Motel Apartments blaze that killed six people in downtown Las Vegas in December spurred public policy reforms.
In the most significant parallel of the moment, the coronavirus pandemic pulled public health to the forefront of questions over whether the tourist-driven valley was safe. It is not unlike how hotels became an uncertain proposition in the eyes of visitors following fires at the MGM Grand and the Hilton, where eight people died the following February.
“I think it’s similar where you have an underlying issue of health and safety, and then you have layered on top of that the issue of public relations and perceptions,” said David G. Schwartz, a gaming historian and associate vice provost for faculty affairs at UNLV.
A ‘fortunate’ escape
As Las Vegans remember the solemn 40th anniversary of the fire at the MGM Grand, now Bally’s, so too do some of the people who were most intimately involved.
Charlie Lombardo, then an apprentice slot mechanic, keeps burned coins and playing cards as a reminder of that morning when he briefly crawled on his hands and knees on the casino floor after an overhead announcement to evacuate the building came shortly after 7 a.m.
Realizing that he was only moving farther into smoke, he reversed course down a hallway toward an exit, where he came upon a noisy coin-counting room with a handful of employees. Lombardo, 72, banged on the door just as smoke crept through the room’s air vents and brought with him a warning: They needed to get out in a hurry.
“It was like, what could have happened so quickly? From nothing to where we are now,” he said. “While it was a devastating event, I always felt I was fortunate enough that I walked out of the casino at the point and time that I did. Because had I not, who knows what would have happened?”
Because of the lack of an automatic sprinkler system, investigators determined,
the fire climbed the wall of the restaurant and through the ceiling, while thick smoke escaped to upper floors through stairwells and improperly sealed elevator shafts.
Also without a sprinkler system, the casino burned. Most people perished from smoke inhalation or carbon monoxide that filtered through hotel room air vents.
Unforgettable experience
At the hotel rooftop, helicopters waited to fly victims to a triage area. And outside the MGM Grand, it was “pandemonium,” according to Joe Castiglia, at the time a volunteer firefighter for the city of Las Vegas, who arrived on the scene by school bus roughly two to three hours after the fire broke out.
“Carrying people up to the roof was an experience I’ll never forget,” he said. “The people we were taking up there were dead, were bodies.”
Castiglia, 81, was tasked with resupplying air bottles to firefighters on upper floors, and as he ascended the stairwell, he saw people being helped: “Their faces were blackened around the nose where they would be breathing up the fumes and everything else.”
Family affair
Becky Lomprey Grismanauskas, 76, was a criminal investigator for the district attorney’s office who
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