A New Year We'll Never Forget

In just a few hours, New Year's Eve festivities were to begin at the Dupont Plaza in San Juan. The hotel's 423 rooms were filled, and every table in the penthouse restaurant had been reserved. It would be, predicted Howard Puig, assistant manager of the hotel's disco, "the night of the year." On the mezzanine, gamblers were already crowding into the posh casino. Through the large picture windows they could see the pounding surf and a clear blue afternoon sky that seemed to bode well. As bettors hunched forward for yet another round of blackjack and croupiers gave the roulette wheels an added spin, there came a whisper: "Smoke." Nobody paid any attention.

Then, out of nowhere, thick black clouds and the crack of two or three explosions. "A ball of fire came through," said Croupier Susano Gonzalez Perez. "It blew open the door. People were trampled." Some raced toward the picture windows, grabbed chairs and hurled them through the thick plate glass, then jumped 30 ft. to the ground. Bathers near the pool where other survivors landed fled from the spray of shards. Many huddling near the casino's closed door, apparently unable to pry it open, died of smoke inhalation. Others farther inside perished immediately; rescue workers found their charred corpses sitting upright in chairs around the blackjack tables. The terror did not end on the mezzanine. Smoke poured out of the lower floors and wrapped the 22-story building in a dense cloak. On the twelfth floor, Nancy Brensson, 12, of Cresskill, N.J., was watching a rerun of The Carol Burnett Show while her mother was taking a shower. "Suddenly the room went dark," she said. "I looked out and saw this cloud. My father said that it was probably rain. But he opened the balcony door, and smoke rushed in."

The Brenssons ran for the stairwell, only to be met by other panicky guests and a thick wall of smoke. "We rushed back up," Brensson said. The family climbed onto the 20th-floor balcony that encircles the hotel. There three men helped lift them and others onto the top of the building. Throughout the late afternoon, six helicopters hovered in the air, plucking survivors from the roof.

By week's end the death toll had reached 95, and at least 106 people were injured. That made the Dupont Plaza inferno the second worst hotel fire in U.S. history, surpassed only by the Winecoff Hotel blaze in Atlanta in 1946, which killed 119. Most of the victims died in the casino, and the rest were found in hallways and rooms on the first four floors.

. Days after the tragedy, investigators were still searching through the rubble, looking for clues about how the inferno started. Fire officials labeled the blaze suspicious and raised the possibility that it had been set by disgruntled union members engaged in a bitter wage dispute with the hotel. But the latest evidence, according to Puerto Rico Governor Rafael Hernandez Colon, has led investigators to speculate that hotel security guards may have set the fire in an effort to discredit the union. Said Hernandez Colon: "We suspect there may be arson because of the very tense labor situation that existed."