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On July 17, 1981, two overhead walkways in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, collapsed, killing 114 people and injuring 216.

The collapse resulted in billions of dollars of insurance claims, legal investigations, and city government reforms. The hotel had been built just a few years before, during a nationwide pattern of fast-tracked large construction with reduced oversight and major failures. Its roof had partially collapsed during construction, and the ill-conceived skywalk design progressively degraded due to a miscommunication loop of corporate neglect and irresponsibility. Convicted of gross negligence, misconduct and unprofessional conduct, the engineering company lost its national affiliation and all engineering licenses in four states, but was acquitted of criminal charges. Company owner and engineer of record Jack D. Gillum eventually claimed full responsibility for the collapse and its unchecked design flaws, and he became an engineering disaster lecturer. The disaster contributed many lessons and reforms to engineering ethics and safety, and to emergency management. It was the deadliest non-deliberate structural failure since the collapse of Pemberton Mill over 120 years earlier, and remained the second deadliest structural collapse in the United States until the collapse of the World Trade Center towers 20 years later.

Described by the newspaper as fast-tracked, construction began in May 1978 on the 40-storey Hyatt Regency Kansas City. The newspaper observed that "Notable structures around the country were failing at an alarming rate", which included the 1979 Kemper Arena roof collapse and the 1978 Hartford Civic Center roof collapse.

Hyatt Regency hotels in business districts had taken to hosting Friday after-work tea dances in their soaring atrium areas. Guests heard popping noises and a loud crack moments before the fourth-floor walkway dropped several inches, paused, then fell completely onto the second-floor walkway.

The two walkways were suspended from a set of 1.25-inch-diameter (32 mm) steel hanger rods, with the second-floor walkway hanging directly under the fourth-floor walkway. Gillum and Associates specified three pairs of rods running from the second-floor walkway to the ceiling, passing through the beams of the fourth-floor walkway, with a nut at the middle of each tie rod tightened up to the bottom of the fourth-floor walkway, and a nut at the bottom of each tie rod tightened up to the bottom of the second-floor walkway. Havens Steel proposed that two separate and offset sets of rods be used: the first set suspending the fourth-floor walkway from the ceiling, and the second set suspending the second-floor walkway from the fourth-floor walkway. In the original design, the beams of the fourth-floor walkway had to support the weight of the fourth-floor walkway, with the weight of the second-floor walkway supported completely by the rods.

The Hyatt Regency reopened on October 1, 1981, the same day that a committee of engineers and architects concluded that there were no other structural safety issues with the building. In 1983, local authorities reported that the $5 million hotel reconstruction made the building "possibly the safest in the country." The hotel was renamed the Hyatt Regency Crown Center in 1987, and the Sheraton Kansas City at Crown Center in 2011.

The Kansas City Star and its associated publication the Kansas City Times won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for their 16 months of investigative coverage of the collapse. Lyrics from the song then turn to the Hyatt: "Take a trip with me to Kansas City MO/To the Hyatt House, to the big dance floor/You can still see the ghosts/But you can′t see the sense/Why they let the monkey go/And blamed the monkey wrench." Gillum (1928–2012), the owner of the engineering company and an engineer of record for the Hyatt project, occasionally lectured at engineering conferences for years after the tragedy.

Failure by Design Hyatt Regency – physics presentation

Quick Facts

• It was the deadliest non-deliberate structural failure since the collapse of Pemberton Mill over 120 years earlier, and remained the second deadliest structural collapse in the United States until the collapse of the World Trade Center towers 20 years later.
• In the original design, the beams of the fourth-floor walkway had to support the weight of the fourth-floor walkway, with the weight of the second-floor walkway supported completely by the rods.
• Havens Steel proposed that two separate and offset sets of rods be used: the first set suspending the fourth-floor walkway from the ceiling, and the second set suspending the second-floor walkway from the fourth-floor walkway.
• Gillum eventually claimed full responsibility for the collapse and its unchecked design flaws, and he became an engineering disaster lecturer.
• The collapse resulted in billions of dollars of insurance claims, legal investigations, and city government reforms.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Hyatt Regency walkway collapse". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.