Firefighters train at stalled Vegas Strip resort

LAS VEGAS — The economic slump is delivering a public safety benefit to southern Nevada firefighters, who are getting a chance to train in a brand-new building for one of the city's worst nightmares, a high-rise hotel fire.

The scene is the unfinished shell of the stalled Fontainebleau hotel resort.

Most years, firefighters from Clark County, Henderson, Las Vegas and North Las Vegas conduct drills together at local resorts, said Las Vegas Fire and Rescue Capt. Brian Gray, who is organizing this year's drills.

But Gray said the Fontainebleau offered a unique opportunity to not only train for multiple days inside a large property without disrupting staff and customers, but also to tour an unfinished property and see how a modern megaresort is built.

"We can't thank Fontainebleau management enough for this opportunity," Gray said.

Firefighters are observing how walls are built, what materials are used inside elevator shafts and how far above casino floors sprinklers are mounted — all information that could save lives of tourists and firefighters in a real blaze.

It's been almost 30 years since Las Vegas experienced one of the world's worst hotel fires: a blaze at the former MGM Grand on the Strip in November 1980 that killed 87 people and injured nearly 700 others. An arson fire at the Las Vegas Hilton nearly three months later killed eight people.

Since then, tough Clark County codes have required fire suppression sprinklers in new hotels and large buildings.

Preparing for the Fontainebleau drills took three months, Gray said. The idea took hold about the same time privately held Fontainebleau Resorts LLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after two years of construction on the nearly $3 billion resort. Plans call for almost 4,000 hotel rooms, condominiums, a casino and spa.

The largest challenge was to arrange training dates and times to allow every firefighter in the area to attend, barring illness or vacation. The training will culminate in a full-scale simulated fire at the 63-story building in early November. Details won't be known in advance by the firefighters.

An Oct. 12 walkthrough of the property offered firefighters a chance to reacquaint themselves with the tasks of high-rise firefighting before the major drill.

"It's not our typical house fire, which we're very good at," Gray said. He said firefighters tend to try to respond to high-rise fires like they're regular houses, which doesn't work.

Among differences, Gray said, are long hallways and tall flights of stairs.

Stairs are an especially brutal concern for the first firefighters to arrive, since the multi-agency plan for high-rise fires says that before reinforcements arrive and secure the elevators, all firefighters must carry equipment up the stairs with them.

Another challenge is that all four fire departments use slightly different equipment and radio lingo. The unified command for high-rise fires is standardizing radio etiquette, but there are still minor differences in hose types and spray nozzles.

One part of training is to familiarize firefighters with counterparts' equipment.

Beyond dousing flames, the main challenges in high-rise fires are managing the arrival of new fire crews outside the building and cordoning off and controlling the lobby so guests and staff can be evacuated and firefighters can get in.

Firefighters need security staff and building engineers to explain the property and turn over control of service elevators that go to all floors and have higher carrying capacities than passenger elevators.

They also need to ventilate smoke and establish a staging area two floors below a fire for firefighters to rest, get drinking water and obtain fresh bottles of air to breathe.

Of these tasks, one of the least intuitive is removing smoke. It is also one of the most important.

Fire maims and scars, but smoke suffocates and kills many more people, said Las Vegas fire Capt. Brad Hannig, one of the trainers.

At a house fire, the standard solution, often even before firefighters go into a building, is to break out windows. But high-rise windows are hard to break, fall a long way to the ground and might make a fire worse by allowing air and wind to feed flames.

The best solution is to pressurize building stairwells with high-powered portable fans so that air moves up a stairwell on one side, reaches the floor of the fire and pushes smoke down the hallway, up the stairwell on the other end and out through the roof.

Hotels have ventilation and duct systems that are designed to suppress a fire, but they can't be the first line of attack, Hannig said.

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Information from: Las Vegas Sun, http://www.lasvegassun.com