Arizona Republic from Phoenix, Arizona • Page 3

A2 The Arizona Republic Wednesday, March 17, 1993 Chicago hotel fire leaves 15 dead, dozens injured Women miners oppose reform a -1 .40 Vis .1 hospitals for treatment, some for severe burns and others with broken bones suffered in leaps. Bodies were later found "throughout the building," Cosgrove said. Officials said there were 15 confirmed dead and more than a dozen others missing, but it was not certain whether they had been killed or had escaped and sought shelter elsewhere. Rescue crews worked into the night tearing away the rubble with a crane in search of other possible victims. Fire engulfed two stairways, trapping residents of the upper floors.

City officials said the four-story Paxton Hotel was classified as a "single room occupancy" building, meaning it did not have to have fire-protection systems, such as sprinklers, as standard hotels do. Mayor Richard Daley Jr. called the fire a "great tragedy" and suggested that fire codes governing such buildings may need to be revised. Most of the residents were poor or elderly people who rented by the week or month. Police said they were investigating the possibility that the fire began in a space heater in a first-floor room and were questioning one resident.

One televised report said a wheelchair-bound man admitted to police that he had been cooking a batch of smokable "crack" cocaine the night before and awoke to find his room in flames. Police would not confirm the report, and the possibility of arson had not been ruled out, they said. In one rescue, firefighters were pulling a man from a window when he told them his mother was still inside. "The squad men went in and were able to rescue his mother, and his mother has survived," Cosgrove said. Another resident, 49-year-old cabdriver Sidney Smith, said he lowered his 250-pound body from his smoked-filled room on the third floor by tying knotted sheets to a window handle.

He said that on the way down, he saw other residents trapped behind barred windows yelling for help. Reuters CHICAGO Flames raced through a $70-a-week residential hotel on Chicago's Near North Side early Tuesday, killing at least 15 people and injuring about 30 others who jumped from windows, officials said. Residents "were at the windows fighting for air and trying to escape the flames" when firefighters arrived, Chicago Fire Department spokesman Mike Cos-grove said. Television cameras caught one woman, lying on a blanket, after her rescue, crying over and over, "The fire's burning me, the fire's burning me." Screams could be heard in the background from others pleading for help. One man said he escaped by jumping to a tree.

Others tried to flee by grabbing onto downspouts, and some lowered themselves on makeshift ropes fashioned from bed-sheets. Firefighters said they rescued 60 people, plucking many from smoky windows. About 30 people were taken to Chicago Tribune A man is helped away from the scene of a Chicago hotel fire. Firefighters rescued 60 people, plucking many from smoky windows. rv Indian who lived through massacre dies after slip-up -Vs) 11 ViA, ft t.HMW rr 5 i 1 nw" i I A Mary Jo Estep Told of the mistake, but not the severity of her condition, a report says.

1. i i jr By Martin Van Der Werf The Arizona Republic WASHINGTON They were here, as one woman put it, to "add some emotionalism" to the mining issue. The women, more than 40 of them, come from 16 Western states and earn large salaries in a traditionally male-dominated industry. They are afraid that they are about to lose their jobs. "I raised my family, I worked too hard to get where I am now to lose it all," said Donna Roller, 53, a Yuma grandmother who drives more than 100 miles round-trip every day to her job as a blaster and drill operator in a southern California gold mine.

She was standing in a hallway Tuesday morning outside a Senate hearing room where opposing sides debated a proposal to abolish the selling -of federal land for mining claims and to force mining firms to pay royalties on the value of minerals they remove from federal land. Currently, companies that can prove a mineral lode exists on federal land can buy the property for $2.50 to $5 an acre. The government gets no percentage of the value of the minerals extracted. Roller works at the Mesquite Gold Mine near Glamis, owned by Hanson PLC, a British conglomerate. Their trips bankrolled by their employers, Roller and four other Arizona women made up part of an impromptu cheering section that applauded Western senators who said large royalties would drive mines out of the country.

They jeered at other senators and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who said that stopping miners from getting minerals for next to nothing is only fair. "He (Babbitt) seems to ignore the human factor," said Kathy Cash, 31, of Tucson, a foreman in the mill of the Asarco copper mine in Hayden. "We've got a lot of little towns in Arizona that are dependent op mining. And these are people that probably voted for him." Babbitt was elected twice as governor and once as attorney general in Arizona. Babbitt, appearing exasperated at times, staunchly defended the proposed changes, particularly the imposition of royalties.

"The American mining industry is not leaving this country. They are not going out of business," Babbitt said. "These same people were in front of the Arizona Legislature 15 years ago and none of these dire predictions came true." He said there have been royalties for years on coal, oil and natural gas removed from public lands. "There is no reason why there should be some sort of mystical exception for mining," Babbitt said. For years, mining-law reform was blocked in the Senate, where Western states hae proportionately more power.

But it is becoming clear that even the Senate is coming around to a realization that the Clinton administration is going to push through a reform package of some sort Sen. Bennett Johnston, chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, who has blocked mining-law reform in the past, said he believes the law will be altered this year. For the women watching in the back of the hearing room, thousands of miles from the mines they know so well, this prospect raises grave doubts about their livelihoods. The mining industry Monday released a report from an economist predicting that over the next decade, the Senate reform bill, sponsored by Sen. Dale Bumpers, would cost 4,100 jobs in the mining industry and more than 13,000 related jobs.

"I've been working in the Arizona mining industry since 1975," said Barbara Savage, 40, a senior research engineer at the Phelps Dodge Corp. copper mine in Morenci. "This is my fourth mining company. The industry keeps dying around me, and I keep resurrecting myself. How long do you think that can last?" The Associated Press YAKIMA, Wash.

A woman who survived what is believed to have been the nation's last massacre of Indians has died more than 80 years later after being given the wrong medicine at a care home. At least three investigations are under way into the Dec. 19 death of 82-year-old Mary Jo Estep, who received no treatment after the staff of Good Samaritan Health Care Center in Yakima realized the error. Estep was a member of the Shoshone Mike band of Bannock Indians, who refused to give up their nomadic ways to settle on a reservation. In 1911, her parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles eight people in all died when they were ambushed by a posse near Winne-mucca, Nev.

Four children survived the three-hour battle, but all but one died of tuberculosis within a year. Estep was raised by Anglos and became an elementary-school teacher. The Washington Department of Social and Health Services' investigation hasn't determined whether the medication error was the direct cause of death, agency spokesman Gordon Schultz said Monday. The department's report has been referred to the Yakima County Prosecutor's Office for a decision on criminal charges. Police and a county medical society also are investigating.

The report says Estep accidentally was given three doses of medication T.v 'l two for hypertension and one for heart problems intended for another resident. The care home was fined $2,500 last month. The mistake was discovered within a half-hour, but no corrective measures were taken because Estep had signed a directive barring extraordinary measures to keep her alive. The forms don't address treatment of reversible conditions, the report says, and care-home officials say they are re-evaluating them. Estep was told of the mistake but not the severity of her condition or treatment options, the report says.

She remained alert much of the day but died about 11:30 p.m., after her heart rate and blood pressure fell. Earlier that evening, the report says, a nurse who had power of attorney in Estep's health matters called the woman's physician, but he refused to take the call. Shortly after that, the nurse declined the center's offer to rush Estep to a hospital. Rick BowmerThe Associated Press A unidentified woman carries a cross toward Waco, Texas, near the site of the Branch Davidian siege. The woman said she is walking across the country and is not a sect member, adding, "A little Jesus doesn't use guns." i Cultists, lawmen meet face to face for 1 st time Leader's health waning, authorities told Young-adult cholesterol test waste of money, team says County Sheriff Jack Harwell, who knows Koresh and some of his followers, met with sect members Steve Schneider, Koresh's top lieutenant, who is playing an increasingly prominent role in the negotiations, and Wayne Martin, a Harvard-educated lawyer.

Swensen said the talks covered "a variety of topics," including the physical condition of the 105 people inside the compound and "the legal process of what would happen when they come out." "It's mostly the process itself that they're concerned with 'When we surrender, where do we go, do we get an attorney' questions of the legal process in general," he said. In addition to haggling over details of how the standoff could be resolved, Swensen said, "there is that overriding problem of waiting for God's word" before the cult members will agree to surrender. Koresh, the cult's 33-year-old leader, was wounded when agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms stormed the compound Feb. 28. Four agents were killed and 16 wounded in the shootout, which also left an unknown number of cult members killed or wounded.

Swensen said Koresh's wound "is getting worse," and he described the cult leader as still in control but in a "progressive downhill condition." Although Koresh initially was "in some pain but somewhat ambulatory," Swensen said, "now he's basically lying down most of the time or sitting up most of the time, and he's said himself he can't move from one room to the next very easily." But he said there is no evidence that Koresh is dying or that his hold on his followers is weakening. "I think he's the power behind the scene," Swensen said. He said the 17 children in the compound presumably are under the control of the adults, and "there are no adults trying to break out the windows and get away." Swensen said the conditions of other wounded cult members "have clearly gotten worse," particularly that of Judy Schneider, Schneider's wife. She has told negotiators that a wounded finger has become infected and that she might cut it off. The Washington Post WACO, Texas For the first time, law-enforcement officials have met face to face with two members of the Branch Davidian sect outside the group's embattled compound amid growing indications cult leader David Koresh's physical condition is deteriorating, federal authorities said Tuesday.

The hourlong meeting took place late Monday afternoon on a road about 60 yards from the fortified compound, where hundreds of law-enforcement officials have engaged in a 17-day standoff with the cult. Although the meeting produced no breakthroughs, the brief encounter on the flat, windswept land about 10 miles east of Waco produced a rare glimmer of hope for weary federal authorities who are trying to negotiate a peaceful surrender by Koresh and his followers. "At this stage, we view any meeting as a successful meeting," FBI spokesman Richard Swensen said. "We're hopeful it will lead to something better." Swensen said an unidentified federal negotiator and McLennan levels in young adults with the most widely used drugs, the researchers said, could pose unknown dangers because the long-term effects of cholesterol-lowering drugs begun in early life remain unknown. The report appears in today's Journal of the American Medical Association and is from researchers at the University of California at San Francisco and Stanford University.

Dr. Stephen Hulley, chief of clinical epidemiology at UCSF, directed the study. It was promptly denounced as misleading and perhaps dangerous by one expert, who insisted that if severely high cholesterol levels in young adults remained undetected, those adults would be needlessly put in danger, when such simple steps as diet and lifestyle changes could lower their cholesterol levels and help protect against later coronary disease. San Francisco Chronicle SAN FRANCISCO When a national panel of experts on heart disease recommended five years ago that all men and women over age 20 have their cholesterol levels checked, baby boomers flocked by the millions to do just that. Now, specialists who have calculated the costs, the effectiveness and the possible hazards of drug treatments designed to lower cholesterol in young adults have come to a different conclusion.

In a report, the researchers argue that routine testing of cholesterol levels in all men under age 35 and all women under 45 is unnecessary, possibly unethical and a gross waste of money, unless the young adults already are known to have coronary heart disease or other serious risk factors. Treating above-normal cholesterol fez Tturti pmrti of tbt tonton VwsfMpttv Inc. contain rro-cietj pUnl fibrr. Fur jirnr scares rrc)clin) CfMrr and otbtr infiirmatiiHi in the Phtirnh metro am: 253-IW7 (OIAN-Un. Outskfe thr Ptxirnh metro am: 1-100 H73J73 (HUSO.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE Ever notice how geologists are always finding fault? TODAY'S PRAYER Lord, teach us the grace of compromise in our relaaonihips. Amen. CLARIFICATION A tribal leader who was quoted in an article that ran on Page One of The Arizona Republic on March 5 now says that he was not approached by Gary Fitzsimmons, assistant to the director of the State Gaming Agency, about setting up an off-track betting operation with the tribe. FANTASY 5 Tuesday's winning numbers: 09 10 17 18 21 If 1 0 or fewer players select all five winning numbers, each gets $50,000. If more than 10 players win, all split a pool of $500,000.

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