Law Story: Lesson from the Fire Marshal

MGM Grand Fire, Las Vegas 1980

     “Sit with your back to the wall,” the Fire Marshal instructed me. A lieutenant in his department had screwed up, and we had an angry group to confront.

  The Marshal was Bobby Lee Hansen, a tall, silver-haired man with a direct way of speaking.  When one of his employees sued him, he reported to the City Attorney’s office to prepare for giving a sworn statement. “The first thing you’re going to hear about me is that I’m having an affair with a woman in my department. Well, it’s true” he said.  (He and Diane have since been married for many years.)

When the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas caught fire, killing 85 people, it was Bobby Lee Hansen who flew to Las Vegas to investigate. He came home convinced of the need to retrofit high-rise structures with greatly improved fire safety equipment, and he wanted to see required changes written into law.

The story was that his lobbying for change brought him before a committee of the State Legislature,  but time and time again, the Committee seemed to run out of time before it could hear from him.  Owners of tall buildings had been heard from, and they opposed retrofitting. It was expensive, and in the past, so long as a building was built up to code at the time of construction, it was not required to upgrade as building codes were upgraded, unless they remodeled extensively. Finally, when the Chairman cut off testimony again, Bobby Lee Hansen rose up and sent chairs crashing all around him. Hastily, the Chairman reconvened the hearing and listened to Marshal Hansen.

He got his changes, and our business that day arose after those changes in  the Uniform Fire Code,with Washington’s local amendments, had gone into effect. A high-rise residential condominium building had been constructed in Seattle with all the latest fire safety equipment built in: Automatic fire sprinklers, smoke detectors, fire alarm voice enunciators, strip lights to guide residents through smoke to the escapes, pressurized stairwells to keep out smoke, etc. A  fire lieutenant inspected and signed the occupancy permit, and the new owners moved in.

One year later, the Seattle Fire Department came back to do confidence testing on the building, to make sure that everything was working. But it wasn’t. In fact, none of the fire fixtures worked. Puzzled, and inspector removed one of the fixtures and peered into the ceiling. The device had never been connected. It was sitting there in place, never connected to a power source. The contractor who had built the building had disappeared, and the King County Prosecutor’s Fraud unit was looking for him. Now the home-owners were facing an expensive repair that could leave them with ugly conduit running down their halls instead of being concealed within the walls, and they wanted to know who was going to pay.

“Sit with your back to the wall,” Marshal Hansen advised.