Engineering Disasters (10 of 28)

This is truly what would be called an accident, where a huge number of small items all came together at the same time and resulted in a disaster.
Bad luck turned relatively minor defects into a major catastrophe.
The flammable Deli booths and ceiling tiles, the locking stairway doors, the propped open air conditioner and the smoke-spreading seismic joints, all played a part in the tragedy.
Six months after the fire, the MGM Grand re-opened with a five million dollar fire safety system.
The hotel, now owned by Bally's, is considered one of the safest in the world.
What happened um, after the fire, more stringent codes were added to the fire code regulations.

Ah, Bally's ah, decided to go far and above the codes that did come out.
We have over twelve hundred and fifty ah, system generated smoke detectors.
What I mean by that, they are all tied into a central computer.
We have over eight thousand audio evacuation speakers.
Um, we have water flows and tampers and sprinklers throughout the building.
We have over thirty thousand sprinkler heads.
As we know, the most dangerous thing in a fire is smoke.
Um, what we did is added pressurization fans to the stairwells.
Um, when it, when an alarm comes in to the central computer, ah, these fans automatically turn on and pressurize these stairwells which will not allow any smoke in.
And then everything gets vented out through the roof.
However, not all hotels are as safe as Bally's.
When you come to a high-rise building, you need to know where the exits are.