Blackmon-Mooring Enterprises of Fort Worth will clean up the recently fire damaged Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas.

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1 Hilton cleanup job awarded FW company to tackle damaged hotel in Las Vegas By Joe Simnacher Blackmon-Mooring Enterprises of Fort Worth will clean up the recently fire damaged Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas. The Hilton fire killed eight persons last week and damaged more than 20 stories of the nation s largest hotel. The owners have decided to clean up the damage and the Fort Worth firm has formed a new subsidiary to handle the massive project. The new company, Blackmon Mooring Steamatic Catastrophe Inc., specializes in handling fire and flooddamage buildings on location, a company spokesman said Monday. Blackmon-Mooring has been cleaning up damage from disasters, fires and floods for some time in addition to its more visible work of cleaning carpets, furniture and draperies. For example, the Dallas Diamond Shamrock Tower fire and shootings at the Cullen Dais mansion called for the company s expertise. The company served as a consultant after the fire at the MGM Grand Hotel, which burned Nov. 21 killing 84 persons. But the MGM s owners decided to refurbish the big hotel rather than clean it up. Contacts established with insurance adjusters at the time of the MGM Grand Hotel fire helped the Fort Worth Company with the Hilton contract, which was signed Sunday. It calls for Blackmon-Mooring to clean about 1,500 of the Hilton s 2,783 rooms, all of the hotel s hallways as well as several miles of airconditioning equipment. The MGM had 10 miles (of air ducts) and the Hilton is quite a bit larger, The Blackmon-Mooring spokesman said. I don t know exactly how much mileage we re talking about. The new company has sent 35 experts from Los Angeles, Dallas-Fort worth, Houston and Lubbock to supervise the extensive Hilton job. The experts will hire people in Las Vegas to do much of the actual cleaning, which is to be completed in two or four weeks. About 285 persons are working two 8-hour shifts per day to clean the hotel. The firm said the Hilton contract does not have a dollar figure. A final amount will be established after the project is done.

2 Vegas cleanup nearly complete By Edward Hanley The Fort Worth Star Telegram Blackmon-Mooring Steamatic Catastrophe Inc., formed recently to contract major fire and flood cleanups anywhere in the United States, is winding down its job of cleaning the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel, which was damaged extensively by fire last month. Hilton executives consider the Fort Worth company s job a minor miracle, said Scott Mooring Jr. We ve cleaned and reodorized about 2,000 rooms now. He said his company is terminating a few of the 250 workers hired in Las Vegas to do the job, and by next Wednesday the job is expected to be virtually complete. Blackmon-Mooring performed more than a minor miracle in hiring the 250 people in about three hours. Mooring said. We advertised in the Las Vegas paper for workers, offering them a pretty good wage. We started hiring at 12 o clock Friday and had it all completed in about three hours. About 400 people showed up in answer to the ad. He said that many of those hired had been employees of either the MGM Hotel or the Hilton. And before they were hired, the employees were warned that each supervisor had the authority to fire if they didn t perform the job properly. And not all had a willingness to work, but we got rid of them, Mooring said. The company drew supervisory support from its Steamatic chain of stores in Fort Worth, Dallas, Los Angeles, Houston and Lubbock. Mooring said that the Steamatic s married employees have been rotated on the Las Vegas job, but some employees have been at the job site since work was begun. Blackmon thinks he s a part of the hotel now, Mooring joked about his partner, W.G. Blackmon Jr., who has been in Las Vegas most of the time during the last two weeks. The company has the expertise to mobilize a large crew and move in and out of a job swiftly. That s what others can t do, Mooring said.

3 Houston Cronical Tuesday, May 26, 1981 Renovation often costs less-than replacement Texas firm travels to fire-damaged sites By Sharon Donovan When fire engulfed the Las Vegas Hilton earlier this year it brought the nation s attention to inherent dangers of high-rise hotels. But while others were debating adequate fire safety procedures and precautions, a Texas-based company was trying to salvage what was left of the Las Vegas Hilton. The fast-moving fire, which jumped from floor to floor of the 30-2tory hotel on the night of Feb. 10 killed eight people and injured about 200 others. Rummaging through the debris, cleaning and salvaging crews of Blackmon Mooring Steamatic Catastrophe Inc., with shared headquarters in Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth, resurrected much of the more than $2 million in damage to the hotel and its furnishings. Most of the damage was caused by soot and smoke. Another estimated $28 million in damage was done to the hotel structure. Bob Mooring, vice president of the firm said the company was launched several months before the Hilton fire as a spate firm from Blackmon Mooring Steamatic which has 220 locations in the United States and Canada. Most of these are franchises, with about half their workload residential and commercial cleaning of all kinds and the other half in local fire restoration. Mooring said catastrophe division, formally known as BMS CAT., was developed with the flexibility to get its fire restoration experts within 24 hours of the aftermath of big fires anywhere in the country. He said that restoration generally costs about 25 percent of replacement costs of the damaged items. Firms like his are usually called to the scene of a fire by the insurance companies to make a determination how much can be salvaged and what will need to be replaced. Mooring is one of four executives who take turns commandeering the company s assault on ruin. They have another 150 company personnel whose services as needed. Generally, the company sets up shop at the site of the fire, hiring local residents to help with the massive clean-up jobs. To tackle the Las Vegas Hilton for example, Mooring s crew was at the site by the end of the day following the night of the fire.

4 By the end of the next day, the crew had expanded to 28 supervisors flown in from all parts of the United States. The following day, the crew had mushroomed to 46 people. They first set up makeshift hiring quarters in three nearby motel rooms where 500 local job applicants lined up for interviews. Of those, the company hired 340 people to work 10-hour shifts daily. For the next 20 days workers labored around the clock. Of the hotel s 2,800 rooms the hotel is the largest in the nation and only 25 rooms competing with a hotel in Moscow as the world s largest 1,800 rooms were targets of the crews work. The crews managed to turn two floors a day back to hotel management which then prepared them for immediate occupancy. While the hotel s east wing was gutted, the north wing was left relatively untouched, and with a little help from the Blackmon Mooring s consultation team, hotel personnel were able to do the clean-up work themselves and open the wing for business. But most of the remainder of the hotel was left to the BMS CAT Inc. s restoration devices. One crew worked exclusively on walls and ceilings. Armed with special high density raw rubber sponges, workers carefully scrubbed walls to absorb the soot from walls that were not damaged enough to need repainting. Walls that had been damaged by water got the special wet clean treatment and were then sealed in preparation for painting. In the bathrooms, the damage to tile was minimal, but the grout between the tiles had to be restored, cleaned with a degreaser and then rinsed thoroughly. In cases where the process would not remove stubborn stains, the ritual was repeated then the tiles polished. For this time-consuming process, the company assigned women whom Mooring has found are more adept at work requiring detailed cleaning with toothbrushes and Q-Tips. Their male colleagues, on the other hand, were assigned the wall and ceiling details because the work was not as detailed and they could generally reach greater heights. Yet another crew handled the furniture mirrors and windows. The sliding windows on tracks were ticklish, with runners which had to be carefully vacuumed to get all the soot and dirt out of the tracks. A deodorizing crew worked feverishly to neutralize the odor pervading the entire hotel. Not a simple matter of spraying lemon-scented air deodorant, their strategy required placing solid gels in the airconditioning units. As the blower system pulls contaminated air across the gels surface, chemicals attract and absorb odor causing elements. At the site of a more recent fire, the Amfac Hotel, located near the Los Angeles Airport and owned by the Continental Hotel Cor., Blackmon Mooring s crews again sprang into action.

5 As short circuit in a television wire on the fifth floor room spread, gutting the entire floor, causing water and soot damage throughout the hotel s 12-story tower. Four days after the 150-member crew started, three-quarters of the hotel reopened for business; several days after that, the rest of the hotel was operating. The tab for restoration came to $200,000, considerably less than the $1.5 million estimate of replacing the items, Mooring said.

6 Texas Company Completes Massive Clean-Up Job at Las Vegas Hilton Blackmon-Mooring Steamatic Catastrophe, Inc., a newly formed subsidiary of Blackmon-Mooring Enterprises in Fort Worth, completed the massive clean-up of the Las Vegas Hilton fire in late March after three-and-a-half weeks of work. The company cleaned about 1500 of the Hilton s 2783 guest rooms, all the hallways and several miles of air-conditioning equipment. Experts from California and Texas worked on the project, along with locally-hired personnel. About 285 people worked two 8-hour shifts daily to complete the job within the month guaranteed by Blackmon-Mooring. The firm has done residential fire restoration for years, according to a company spokesman, but became involved in the hotel industry when it served as a consultant after the fire at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. We advised them on which of their expensive items could be salvaged, said Marcia Anderson, who points out that fire damage is tricky because items which appear totally destroyed often can be saved by expert treatment. Ultimately, owners of the MGM decided to refurbish the hotel rather than clean it up. In the last twelve months, says Ms. Anders, there has been an increase in commercial fires across the country, including in the hotel industry, and it was a natural field for us to enter because we had the experience at cleaning carpets, drapes and furnishings as well as the experience in fire restoration. The company also specializes in repairing flood damage.