LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — It was just after 7 a.m. on Nov. 21, 1980, when the Clark County Fire Department received and responded to the call of a fire in a restaurant on the casino floor of the MGM Grand Resort and Casino.
That morning, retired Clark County firefighter and paramedic Jim Perkins was just getting off his shift from Station 11 when he was called back in to assist.
WATCH | Perkins spoke to Anyssa Bohanan about that day:
"The fire was smoldering and burning for a very long time before it finally broke out and got the air it needed, and the dragon got set loose," Perkins said.
Part of a small team that specialized in high-rise rescues, Jim Perkins was among some of the first on the scene. He and his partner were assigned to get inside and begin evacuating people to the roof.
"We got in on the 14th floor and the smoke was about six inches off the floor, so you had to crawl down the hallways of the hotel," Perkins said. "The first thing we seen was the elevator in the lobby of the 14th floor. There was probably 12 to 14 fatalities piled up in front of the elevator doors."
Documents from that day show that within six minutes of the fire being discovered, the entire casino area was engulfed in flames, burning at a rate of 15 to 19 feet per second.
Smoke and heat quickly rose from the bottom floor up through the 26-story high-rise. Most of the more than 80 people who lost their lives that day died due to smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning.
"We’d come to a door, stand up, bust it open. Sometimes we would find fatalities in the room...it just depended on whether their outside doors had got open and the smoke had gotten into the room," Perkins said.
The nightmares have haunted me my entire life.
For hours, Jim and others went door to door, room to room, guiding and sometimes fully carrying hundreds of survivors up to the roof.
"We had helicopters coming in from everywhere in the Valley that were picking the people up, and then we’d head back down and do another floor," Perkins said.
"It was overwhelming. You didn’t really have time to think about it at the time; you just did your job and did what you were trained to do. The nightmares from that have haunted me my entire life."
But out of the tragedy came historic safety code changes in Nevada and nationwide.
A law that went into effect the following year now requires all buildings open to the public in the state to have sprinklers, smoke detectors in rooms and elevators, as well as exit maps in all hotel rooms.
"The Clark County Fire Department and the whole state of Nevada got together to make that happen immediately," Perkins said. "And I’m very proud of being a part of that."
Perkins also says he's glad to hear that Las Vegas continues to keep the memory of that fateful day alive. He remained with the fire department for 30 years before retiring in 2003. Of his storied career, he says, given the opportunity, he'd do it all again.
Watch the full interview with Jim Perkins here:
