A blaze at the Hotel Arizona on Monday, October 20 was arson, but thanks to the lessons of a hotel fire nearly 30 years ago, this time no lives were lost. There was an orderly evacuation, and thanks to sprinklers, the fire was out by the time firefighters arrived.

The streets outside the hotel were packed with guests who got a rude awakening when fire alarms went off in the middle of the night. But thanks to history and lessons learned here in Tucson, it could have been much worse.

The fire broke out on the hotel’s ninth floor. “It was a small ficus tree that somehow caught fire,” said Hotel Arizona General Manager John Cousins. The blaze triggered a nearby sprinkler, and the alarms evacuated more than 250 people.

“There were no injuries reported, and the damage is very minimal because the sprinkler had activated and controlled the fire and prevented people from getting hurt,” said Tucson Fire Captain Tricia Tracy.

Hotel staff spent the day cleaning up the water damage. “We extracted the carpets and we’re drying them out with carpet fans,” said Cousins. He admits it’s a small price to pay compared to what could’ve happened had sprinklers not been in place.

It’s all due in large part to the Pioneer Hotel fire on December 20, 1970. “For Tucson, that was the one single event that prompted the pursuit of retrofitting sprinklers,” said Northwest Fire Division Chief Jim Grasham. When that fire happened, Grasham was working for the Tucson Fire Department.

“I ended up staying at Station 1 that whole time, scribing that whole event as it unfolded on radio waves,” he says. 29 people died, but the fire prompted rule changes requiring any building four stories high or greater than 50 feet, have sprinkler systems.

“I take personal pride in it because I was directly involved in the pursuit of the development of those additional regulations,” says Grasham. Those regulations kept the fire at the Hotel Arizona from becoming much worse.

Fire investigators have officially ruled that the Hotel Arizona fire was arson. Now the investigation is underway into who started the blaze.