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A HOTEL MAID from Southeast Asia who had been in the United States less than a year recently discovered a fire blazing in a guest's room. She rang the emergency alarm in the multi-story hotel, but before firefighters could arrive, she had extinguished the flames herself. Nobody was hurt.
The story is from a San Francisco fire department spokesman, who boasts that every multi-story hotel in his city has an on-site fire safety director whose duties include training all hotel personnel in fire prevention. He said the maid's story is an example of how effective the program has been.
New concern has been focused on such programs in the wake of the New Year's Eve fire in which 96 persons died at the Dupont Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Many cities have been weighing new fire-safety standards that apply to high-rise hotels, and others - such as San Francisco - have instituted tougher restrictions that were previously authorized. In some cases, stiffer safety requirements can be traced to the soul-searching that followed an earlier tragedy, a 1980 hotel fire that claimed 84 lives at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
Despite the improvements, fire safety officials say there are no guarantees that another disaster couldn't occur. Hotel fire safety systems vary tremendously by location - both in the United States and abroad. Domestically, for example, there is no federal legislation regarding fire safety for hotels and there are no uniform minimum requirements. Nor are price or chain affiliation an assurance of safety. Deluxe accommodations aren't necessarily better protected than economy rooms, and few hotel chains offer uniform fire prevention systems at all their properties.
So hundreds of high-rise hotels throughout the country don't have sprinkler systems, fire safety training programs or even smoke alarms in guest rooms, making them in effect no safer than the Dupont Plaza. At the San Juan hotel, only a few sections had sprinklers - not the guest rooms and not the casino where the majority of deaths occurred. According to Jose Carrasquillo, executive director of the Puerto Rico Fire Department, high rise hotels on the island are required to have sprinklers only in laundries, kitchens and industrial areas. Smoke alarms are required only in hallways.
The disaster...