Guests tell of panic as Las Vegas hotel swimming pool fire leaves two hurt

Guests have told of the panic after an inferno engulfed the swimming pool deck of their hotel on the Las Vegas strip. They said they thought a high rise building was ablaze as thick smoke rising from the Cosmopolitan hotel filled the air above the city. Guest Matthew Mills said he was woken by people screaming and the fire crackling right outside his pool-view windows. “As soon as the fire started to erupt, the room… it must have jumped up 20, 30 degrees in an instant,” he said. “It was a big mess. The evacuation wasn’t clean, that was for sure. People were just running everywhere.”

We were on our way and there was like a traffic jam, and you could just see this huge smoke. You couldn’t even see the fire, it was just blinding.

Visitor Abbey Scott

It took firefighters about 30 minutes to gain control of the blaze that broke out on the 14th floor of The Cosmopolitan. One person was taken to hospital with smoke inhalation; another was treated for smoke inhalation at the scene. But nobody suffered any burns from the flames that ignited outside on the pool deck. Julio Loredo was in his room on the 33rd floor of the neighboring Vdara hotel when his room started to darken. “We looked out the window, and there was ash hitting our window,” he said.

People were running. We could see small explosions. It was in less than a minute that it was completely engulfed.

Witness Julio Loredo

las vegas fire Americas