It’s deja vu all over again

Philosopher George Santayana was a prolific essayist, novelist and poet, but all most people can recall about him is a single sentence from his book "The Life of Reason": "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Usually it is misquoted.

When Review-Journal special projects reporter Joan Whitely completed her two-month probe of allegations that 17 floors of a tower at the Rio hotel had been renovated without adequate building permits or safety inspections, she included a passage noting that one of the things inspectors generally look for is whether the polarity of an electric outlet is correct.

To explain why this is important, she noted that it was an electrical ground fault that caused the 1980 fire at the MGM Grand that killed 87 people.

She also reported the county building code enforcement department did not send an inspector to the Rio until six months after a worker on the remodeling project complained of possible building code violations. The inspector wrote in a four-paragraph report dated Feb. 16 that he inspected 37 rooms and found only a minor code violation, a light fixture that did not have the properly stamped paperwork.

He overlooked the fact that suites had been doubled in size from what was shown on the plans on file with the county.

The department head said the inspector would "receive appropriate guidance." Whatever that means.

The day after Whitely's initial report, county inspectors reported finding that holes drilled between the 19th and 18th floors were not properly sealed, meaning smoke or fumes from one floor could pour into the other. That was just one of the problems the whistle-blowing worker described. For more than a year he had been largely ignored by the company and the county, until he approached a Review-Journal reporter.

There was a familiar sound to this. Like something was being repeated. Or as Yogi Berra would say: "It's deja vu all over again."

It was the MGM Grand fire, along with a fatal fire at the Las Vegas Hilton a few months later, that prompted the county to adopt stringent fire safety codes and require retrofitting of all hotels. As a result, city fathers proudly boast that the city has the safest hotels in the world.

On the 25th anniversary of the MGM Grand fire, Review-Journal columnist Jane Ann Morrison reported that after that tragedy, inspectors found 83 building code violations. Though a special prosecutor was appointed to look for criminal violations, none was ever found and the prosecutor died without ever filing a report on his investigation.

But Morrison tracked down David Demers, the Massachusetts fire analysis specialist who co-authored the National Fire Protection Association's report on the MGM fire. He said the building code violations were so flagrant that "either nobody looked at it or they looked the other way."

One of the problems at the MGM Grand, which is now Bally's, is that the building codes at the time were interpreted in such a way as to not require sprinkler heads in specific areas of the building. A couple of properly placed sprinklers might have prevented the tragedy.

With all the sprinkler heads now required in hotels, no one is suggesting the Rio tower is a potential towering inferno, but the building codes are there for a reason.

Twenty-five years after that fatal MGM fire, Demers described to Morrison the series of problems that caused the tragic loss of life. Fire dampers bolted open. Improperly installed sprinklers. Exit doors chained shut.

He asked: "How could anybody not have seen that stuff?"

Because they didn't look.

Someone has to be willing to look. Sometimes it takes a newspaper reporter shining the light of public scrutiny into a dark corner to awake the bureaucrats from their afternoon naps.

The county is now looking. Perhaps this time the inspection will not be so cursory as the one back in February. But if you are waiting for someone inside the cushy sanctuary of government employment to be held accountable, don't count on it. That history just keeps on repeating.

Thomas Mitchell is editor of the Review-Journal and writes about the role of the press and access to public records. He can be reached at 383-0261 or via e-mail at tmitchell@reviewjournal.com.