During a night of celebrating the holidays, a tragic fire struck the heart of downtown Tucson, Arizona, the Pioneer International Hotel. The hotel towered 11 stories in the air and hosted guests resting in their rooms as well as approximately 650 others that celebrated in the banquet room and other meeting rooms. Shortly after midnight on December 20th, 1970 a fire ignited that took twenty-eight lives that night and contributing to another death nine months later. The devastation that night spurred a wave of changes to local buildings that would make safety a priority.
The fire was said to have been set in two separate locations in a hallway on the fourth floor by 16-year-old Louis C. Taylor. The fire spread throughout the hallway and trapped approximately 60 people in their rooms. Some victims tried to escape the flames and smoke by jumping out of upper level windows onto mattresses that had been thrown out first. Others fell victim to the flames, while others never knew what was happening as they passed away in their sleep from carbon monoxide poisoning. The fire had the ability and means to spread through the hallway and up the stairs due to the lack of doors to separate individual floor levels. Investigator Bill Martin described this by stating “There was an opening essentially from the bottom to the top. It was just like a chimney, a fireplace” (as cited in The worst day, n.d., Investigators determine the blaze section). Without the placement of doors to separate floor levels from the hallway, fire and smoke had an unobstructed path to spread both laterally and horizontally throughout the motel.
The hotel lacked smoke alarms that are designed to warn people of a fire. Without this warning system many people never woke u...
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...es in construction, the possibility of another event that would take so many lives was drastically reduced. The ability to reach people in upper levels of high rise building led to the purchase of a 150’ ladder. The cost to retrofit buildings that fall under the outlined criteria was very high, but the cost is no comparison to the loss of life. After the adoption of a uniform fire code in Tucson, all buildings that were required to installed sprinkler systems and smoke alarms and the old way of building stairwells were banned, resulting in a safer community.
Works Cited
Beitler, S. (2008). Tucson, az pioneer international hotel fire, dec 1970. Retrieved from http://www3.gendisasters.com/arizona/4828/tucson%2C-az-pioneer-international-hotel-fire2%C-dec-1970
The worst day in tucson history (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.iklimnet.com/hotelfires/ case9.html
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