The flames spread from the ballroom with terrifying speed, feeding on furniture and rolling through the ground floor toward the casino. The casino had no emergency exit doors. Eighty-four people died there, trapped in a room designed for entertainment that had never been designed for escape. The hotel's 17-story tower housed 423 guest rooms, but the fire alarm system in the tower was not working. Guests learned of the fire only when they smelled smoke, saw flames, heard someone shouting, or heard firefighters arriving below. The Dupont Plaza had opened in 1963 as the Puerto Rico-Sheraton and had been operated by Sheraton until 1980 -- one year before Sheraton implemented significant fire-safety measures across its global chain. No national fire safety standard for hotels existed in the United States until 1990. In the gap between lax local regulations and absent federal ones, the Dupont Plaza operated with 25 safety violations that a subsequent OSHA investigation would catalog, one by one, after it was too late for the knowledge to matter.

The fire killed between 96 and 98 people and injured 140 others. Most of the dead were burned beyond recognition. Their belongings were destroyed alongside them, complicating the identification process and compounding the grief of families who had sent loved ones off to celebrate the new year. The Dupont Plaza fire was the most catastrophic hotel fire in Puerto Rican history and the second deadliest in U.S. territory, after the Winecoff Hotel fire in Atlanta in 1946. These were not statistics. They were people who had been alive that morning -- who had eaten breakfast, packed suitcases, argued about plans. The scale of the loss reshaped San Juan's relationship with the building on Ashford Avenue for years. The hotel sat shuttered for nearly seven years, a charred monument on the beach strip, before AIG acquired the property in 1989 and spent $130 million rebuilding it as a Marriott.

The three employees who set the fire were involved in a labor dispute with hotel management. Negotiations between the hotel and the employees' union -- Local 901 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represented 250 of the hotel's 450 workers -- had begun in October 1986 and stalled. Rivera Lopez had urged the other two men to start the fire. The union denied involvement and offered a $15,000 reward for information. All three men were convicted of murder. Prosecutors recommended sentences of 24 and 25 years. The judge rejected those recommendations, sentencing Escudero Aponte and Rivera Lopez to 99 years each and Jimenez Rivera to 75 years. Jimenez Rivera was released from federal prison in 2001, Rivera Lopez in 2002. The civil litigation that followed was staggering: 2,300 plaintiffs filed 264 separate lawsuits against 230 defendants, seeking $1.8 billion in damages. The cases were consolidated in the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico and tried in phases over years. Payments for deaths and injuries ultimately exceeded $210 million. Court records encompassed more than one million documents.

The Dupont Plaza fire became a catalyst for the kind of regulation that should have existed before 97 people had to die to prove the need. In 1990, Congress enacted national hotel fire safety requirements -- among the first times, as Representative Sherwood Boehlert noted, that the federal government took "direct action to protect the public at large from the danger of fire." The legislation mandated sprinkler systems, working alarms, and emergency exits in hotels across the country. The changes spread internationally, as hotel chains and governments worldwide adopted or strengthened fire safety codes in response to the Dupont Plaza and similar tragedies of the era. The site itself was reborn. AIG announced renovation plans in October 1992, and the rebuilt hotel opened as the San Juan Marriott Resort and Stellaris Casino -- a gleaming property on the same footprint where the unsprinklered tower had stood. Nothing in the Marriott's architecture announces what happened there. The lobby does not contain a memorial plaque. The beach looks the same. But for the families of the dead, and for a city that watched its skyline hold a burned-out shell for the better part of a decade, the ground remembers.