MGM Grand: built to code in 1973, and that was the defence

The fire at the MGM Grand on 21 November 1980 began in a ground-floor deli and was contained relatively quickly. Eighty-five people died, and most of them were nowhere near it. They were on upper floors, in rooms, killed by smoke that had travelled up stairwells, lift shafts and the vertical gaps between floor slabs and the curtain wall.

Eighty-five people died and more than 600 were injured, including firefighters. The cause of death for most of them was smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning, not burns: they were hundreds of feet from any flame. Helicopters lifted people from the roof through the morning while guests broke windows to breathe. The fire itself was largely out within an hour.

The casino had no sprinklers, and that was legal

The design argument was that a casino operates twenty-four hours a day and is therefore never unoccupied: someone would always be present to spot a fire and raise the alarm. It is a coherent argument. It is also an argument about detection, being used to justify the absence of suppression, and nobody at the approval stage separated the two.

Nevada legislated within months, requiring existing high-rise buildings and public assembly spaces to retrofit sprinklers and smoke control rather than resting on the code in force when they were built. Clark County ordinances followed. The NFPA analysis of the fire is still used to teach smoke movement in tall buildings.

Vertical movement is the part people underestimate

The fire stayed low. The smoke did not. Every service riser, every lift shaft, every unsealed penetration made by a contractor over seven years of operation was a route upwards, and the stack effect in a tall building does the rest without needing any help.

That is why compartmentation surveys matter more than they sound like they should. The breach that kills is never the dramatic one. It is a cable tray run through a wall by somebody who did not know the wall was rated, and then made good with expanding foam.

What this means where you sit

The financial aftermath is the part that should interest a board. More than a thousand lawsuits were filed. The settlement fund eventually distributed around 223 million dollars to victims and families — an enormous figure for 1980s litigation — and MGM recovered some 76 million dollars from its own insurers after years of argument about who owed what. The hotel was rebuilt and reopened in eight months, which tells you the physical damage was never the expensive part.

The sprinkler retrofit that Nevada then mandated was a fraction of that cost, and every operator in the state had been able to price it before the fire. This is the recurring shape of the whole series: the work is cheap, the consequence is not, and the gap between them is filled with an argument about whether the building was already compliant.

Singapore's fire code assumes the same thing Nevada learned: the fire safety provisions are judged against the use the building has now, not the approval it received decades ago. If your building has changed use, subdivided floors, added a mezzanine or taken on a tenant with a different occupancy profile, the original fire strategy is a historical document.

Stack effect: the building was the chimney

A tall building in cool weather behaves like a chimney. Warm internal air is less dense than the cold air outside, so it rises through every vertical route available — stair shafts, lift shafts, service risers, and in this building the unsealed gaps between the floor slabs and the curtain wall — drawing replacement air in at the bottom. That pressure difference operates continuously, and it does not care whether what it is carrying is air or smoke.

The fire stayed on the ground floor. The smoke went to the roof through those routes, then spread laterally on the upper floors, entering rooms around loose-fitting doors and through the HVAC system, which continued to run. Most of the people who died were above the twentieth floor, and the cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning and smoke inhalation rather than burns.

Compartmentation is a system, and contractors make holes in it

The retrofit that followed targeted the mechanism rather than the ignition: sprinklers in the spaces that had none, smoke control to keep the routes usable, stair pressurisation so the escape route stays cleaner than the space it serves, self-closing doors so compartments stay closed, and sealing of the vertical gaps that let the smoke travel in the first place.

That last item is the one you can check in your own building this month, and it is almost always where the gaps are. Every cable, pipe and duct that passes through a fire-rated wall or floor needs a tested seal appropriate to the element it penetrates. Every contractor who runs a new cable makes a hole. The making good is the smallest line on their job sheet, and it is the thing that decides whether your compartmentation exists or merely appears on a drawing.

Your 60-second self-check

• When was the last compartmentation survey on your buildings, and did it include the risers and the ceiling voids?
• Do you hold the original fire strategy for each building, and does it describe the building as it is used today?
• If a tenant's fit-out penetrates a fire-rated element, who inspects the making good — your team, or theirs?

Compliance at completion describes the building somebody else handed over, not the one you operate. The free 5-minute Director's Risk Check maps which duties and deadlines apply to your portfolio, each with its official source, so you can see where the exposure sits before someone else finds it for you. Run it at the Director's Risk Check, or send it to whoever holds the files. Built to the standard of the day describes your risk. It has never once described your defence.

Herman's verdict

Built to the standard of the day is a description of your risk, not a defence of it. The fire stayed downstairs; the smoke did not care what year the building was approved.

— Herman