Five-story hotel, two-story ladder

There should be no questions, none, about fire safety at Oregon's largest tourist attraction, the Spirit Mountain Casino and hotel. Yet there are.

This is a place that more than 10,000 visitors, many of them elderly, crowd into every day of the year. It is a five-story casino-hotel served by a tiny fire district that doesn't have enough firefighters, or a ladder truck that can reach above two floors, as The Oregonian's Les Zaitz recently reported.

There's no good excuse for that. Spirit Mountain is the most lucrative casino in Oregon, spinning off millions of dollars of profit each year. Surely its owner, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, has the means and the motivation to help the local West Valley Fire District acquire the equipment and manpower it needs to provide the fire protection the casino requires.

It is true that the tribes built virtually all the fire protection they could into their casino and hotel. A private consultant hired by the Grand Ronde has studied and praised the casino's design and fire safety programs.

But good sprinklers are not enough. Even state-of-the-art fire suppression systems can fail. And even the best evacuation plans can go wrong, especially if employees have a history of reluctance to order evacuations during alarms. After all, 85 people died in a 1980 fire at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, when sophisticated mechanical fire suppression systems failed and the victims were trapped in the upper floors of the 26-story building.

The plain fact is that visitors to Spirit Mountain can and should be better protected from fire. What's needed is more cooperation among the tribes, the local fire district and the state to fund and operate a better equipped and stronger fire response.

Gov. Ted Kulongoski and his staff missed an opportunity earlier this year to address fire safety concerns when they renegotiated the state's casino compact with the Grand Ronde tribes. The only fire safety language in the compact, which sets terms under which the casino can operate, is a single sentence requiring the tribes to install effective fire sprinkler systems, Zaitz reported. Local and state fire officials weren't even asked to comment on the compact.

Oregon keeps getting this wrong. Washington requires casino tribes to pay for local fire services. So does California. Maybe it's too late for Oregon to rewind the clock and require all of its gambling tribes to pay for local fire and emergency services protection. But it's worth noting that eight of the nine Oregon tribes with gaming operations already choose to support local fire service.

The sole exception, Zaitz reported, is the Grand Ronde.

That's not right.

It's not safe, either.