Flashovers in Las Vegas. No, that doesn't mean what you think it means.
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| Here's a picture of hell...I mean, Vegas |
Las Vegas has been
on my mind in the past couple of days. I visited, a little over a
week ago. The city of sin, fun, sinful fun, pretense to secrets, big
hotels, and overall tacky garishness left quite the impression,
stirring up a lot of religious horror and terrible sadness at some of
the things encouraged there while also finding the fun and food
seductive. The food! The food! Holy cow, the Strip has food. And fun.
For everyone! Nothing sinful about the roller coaster on the New York
New York hotel, or the awesome show Celine Dion put on at Caesar’s
palace, or about admiring the boys, and by the boys I mean the architecture.
The architecture! The architecture! Did you know that Las Vegas has five of the ten largest hotels in the world, and eleven of the top twenty? The city has a big ego and a high energy and the buildings match it. The Venetian/Palazzo complex alone has over 7,000 hotel rooms. Almost all of these enormous hotels have been completed in the past ten years. Whether the boom is a cause for celebration or not, I suppose, is up to the observer. Expanding ego and sin at its worst, or libertarian capitalism at its best?
Such philosophical musings are for another post. Whether it represents the best or the worst of our country, Las Vegas’s architectural marvels are by no means a standalone phenomenon. Its history of megaresorts comes as simply as the latest manifestation of a national legacy of building new and bigger and better megabuildings.
And with building megabuildings, comes plenty of opportunity for megamistakes.
Naturally, my reading into the history of megaresorts and hotels uncovered one of the worst hotel disasters in terms of loss of life the country has ever seen. The casino/hotel now called Bally’s was once the MGM Grand, and in 1980, a combination of poor construction practices and management decisions led to a horrifying fire incident that ended with the deaths of eighty-five people and the injury of over seven hundred, mostly through smoke inhalation. There was a combination of elements that allowed such an awful situation to unfold, but I will focus on the one that interests me the most: flashover.
At the time, the hotel possessed no sprinkler systems for fire prevention. A small electrical fire started in a deli that later spread through the entire ground floor of the hotel, including the casino area. Hundreds of thousands of square feet were burned in the matter of minutes; once it began in earnest, the fire spread at an estimated rate of 19 feet per second through the ground floor, exploding as a fireball out the front doors of the building.
What caused the fire to expand that fast?
The answer is FLASHOVER.
When a fire occurs in an enclosed space, temperatures quickly mount until they reach the autoignition temperature of most of the exposed materials in the room. Once this point is reached, everything catches fire almost simultaneously.
So basically, the temperatures in the casino reach such a level that, without even touching flame, all the exposed surfaces in the vicinity of the fire would spontaneously combust, which would then heat the temperature, which would cause the next section to spontaneously combust, and so on and so forth, until the energy from that expansion bursts out the front doors in an explosion.
Considering the speed at which fire can advance from an enclosed space, it's little wonder to me that fire safety now involves automatic sprinklers, fire alarms and fire extinguishers. Because of fire behavior like flashovers, fire can spread so fast that entire buildings could be consumed before any fire equipment arrives. It's important to prevent the fire from getting to the size that it ignites all the other exposed materials in the room, or at least, to give enough warning that people can escape with their lives by the time the few minutes have passed necessary to make the fire that big.
In the meanwhile, how many of you think Las Vegas is due for a moral flashover? Here comes the fire consuming Baal's priests, and by that I mean the guys handing out the booby cards....
The architecture! The architecture! Did you know that Las Vegas has five of the ten largest hotels in the world, and eleven of the top twenty? The city has a big ego and a high energy and the buildings match it. The Venetian/Palazzo complex alone has over 7,000 hotel rooms. Almost all of these enormous hotels have been completed in the past ten years. Whether the boom is a cause for celebration or not, I suppose, is up to the observer. Expanding ego and sin at its worst, or libertarian capitalism at its best?
Such philosophical musings are for another post. Whether it represents the best or the worst of our country, Las Vegas’s architectural marvels are by no means a standalone phenomenon. Its history of megaresorts comes as simply as the latest manifestation of a national legacy of building new and bigger and better megabuildings.
And with building megabuildings, comes plenty of opportunity for megamistakes.
Naturally, my reading into the history of megaresorts and hotels uncovered one of the worst hotel disasters in terms of loss of life the country has ever seen. The casino/hotel now called Bally’s was once the MGM Grand, and in 1980, a combination of poor construction practices and management decisions led to a horrifying fire incident that ended with the deaths of eighty-five people and the injury of over seven hundred, mostly through smoke inhalation. There was a combination of elements that allowed such an awful situation to unfold, but I will focus on the one that interests me the most: flashover.
At the time, the hotel possessed no sprinkler systems for fire prevention. A small electrical fire started in a deli that later spread through the entire ground floor of the hotel, including the casino area. Hundreds of thousands of square feet were burned in the matter of minutes; once it began in earnest, the fire spread at an estimated rate of 19 feet per second through the ground floor, exploding as a fireball out the front doors of the building.
What caused the fire to expand that fast?
The answer is FLASHOVER.
When a fire occurs in an enclosed space, temperatures quickly mount until they reach the autoignition temperature of most of the exposed materials in the room. Once this point is reached, everything catches fire almost simultaneously.
So basically, the temperatures in the casino reach such a level that, without even touching flame, all the exposed surfaces in the vicinity of the fire would spontaneously combust, which would then heat the temperature, which would cause the next section to spontaneously combust, and so on and so forth, until the energy from that expansion bursts out the front doors in an explosion.
Considering the speed at which fire can advance from an enclosed space, it's little wonder to me that fire safety now involves automatic sprinklers, fire alarms and fire extinguishers. Because of fire behavior like flashovers, fire can spread so fast that entire buildings could be consumed before any fire equipment arrives. It's important to prevent the fire from getting to the size that it ignites all the other exposed materials in the room, or at least, to give enough warning that people can escape with their lives by the time the few minutes have passed necessary to make the fire that big.
In the meanwhile, how many of you think Las Vegas is due for a moral flashover? Here comes the fire consuming Baal's priests, and by that I mean the guys handing out the booby cards....
Examples of Backdrafts:
Examples of Flashover:
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