On July 17, 1981, two overhead walkways in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, collapsed, killing 114 people and injuring 216. Loaded with partygoers, the concrete and glass platforms crashed onto a tea dance in the lobby. 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. An investigation concluded that it would have failed under one-third of the weight it held that night. 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.
Background
The Kansas City Star described the national climate of the late 1970s as "high unemployment, inflation and double-digit interest rates [that added] pressure on builders to win contracts and complete projects swiftly". Described by the newspaper as fast-tracked, construction began in May 1978 on the 40-story Hyatt Regency Kansas City. There were numerous delays and setbacks, including the collapse of of the roof. The newspaper observed that "Notable structures around the country were failing at an alarming rate", which included the 1979 Kemper Arena roof collapse
The hotel's lobby was its defining feature, with a multi-story atrium spanned by elevated walkways suspended from the ceiling. These steel, glass and concrete crossings connected the second, third and fourth floors between the north and south wings. The walkways were about long The fourth-level walkway was directly above the second-level walkway.
Collapse
thumb|Lobby floor, during the first day of the investigation. The third-floor walkway shows the comparable three pairs of tie-rods holding its support beams, which failed on the fourth-floor walkway.
thumb|The landing of the concrete fourth-floor walkway, atop the crowded second-floor walkway
About 1,600 people gathered in the atrium for a tea dance on the evening of Friday, July 17, 1981. The second-level walkway held about 40 people at about 7:05 p.m., with more on the third and an additional 16 to 20 on the fourth.
The rescue operation lasted 14 hours, directed by Kansas City emergency medical director Joseph Waeckerle. Survivors were buried beneath the walkways' many tons of steel, concrete and glass, which the fire department's jacks could not move. Volunteers responded to an appeal and brought jacks, flashlights, compressors, jackhammers, concrete saws and generators from construction companies and suppliers. They also brought cranes and forced the booms through the lobby windows to lift debris. Deputy Fire Chief Arnett Williams recalled this immediate outpouring from the industrial community: "They said 'take what you want'. I don't know if all those people got their equipment back. But no one has ever asked for an accounting and no one has ever submitted a bill." and the hotel's driveway and lawn were used as a triage area. Able survivors were instructed to leave the hotel to simplify the rescue effort, and morphine was given to the mortally injured. Blood centers quickly received lineups of hundreds of donors. Water from the hotel's ruptured sprinkler system flooded the lobby and put trapped survivors at risk of drowning. The final rescued victim, Mark Williams, spent more than nine hours pinned underneath the lower skywalk with both legs dislocated and having nearly drowned before the water was shut off.
Casualties
A total of 114 were killed and 216 injured, Rescuers often had to dismember bodies to reach survivors among the wreckage. and national engineering firm Simpson, Gumpertz, and Heger Inc. to investigate the collapse, and Lischka discovered a change to the original design of the walkways. Edward Pfrang, lead investigator for the National Bureau of Standards, characterized the neglectful corporate culture surrounding the entire Hyatt construction project as "everyone wanting to walk away from responsibility". with the second-floor walkway hanging directly under the fourth-floor walkway. The fourth-floor walkway platform was supported on three cross-beams suspended by the steel rods retained by nuts. The cross-beams were box girders made from C-channel strips welded together lengthwise, with a hollow space between them. The original design by Jack D. 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. This original design supported 60% of the minimum load required by Kansas City building codes.
Havens Steel Company had manufactured the rods, and the company noted that the whole rod below the fourth floor would have to be threaded in order to screw on the nuts to hold the fourth-floor walkway in place. These threads would be subject to damage as the fourth-floor structure was hoisted into place. 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.
This design change would be fatal. 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. In the revised design, however, the fourth-floor beams supported both the fourth- and second-floor walkways, but were only strong enough for 30% of that load. During the failure, the box beams split along the weld and the nut supporting them slipped through the resulting gap, which was consistent with reports that the upper walkway at first fell several inches, after which the nut was held by the upper side of the box beams; then the upper side of the box beams failed as well, allowing the entire walkway to fall in a cascading failure. A court order was required to retrieve the skywalk pieces from storage for examination.
Investigators concluded that the underlying problem was a lack of proper communication between Jack D. Gillum and Associates and Havens Steel. In particular, the drawings prepared by Gillum and Associates were preliminary sketches, but Havens Steel interpreted them as finalized drawings. Gillum and Associates failed to review the initial design thoroughly, and engineer Daniel M. Duncan accepted Havens Steel's proposed plan via a phone call without performing necessary calculations or viewing sketches that would have revealed its serious intrinsic flaws—in particular, doubling the load on the fourth-floor beams. The single largest award was about , for a victim who required full-time medical care. That lawsuit yielded $10 million, including $6.5 million dedicated as donations to charitable and civic endeavors that Hallmark called a "healing gesture to help Kansas City put the tragedy of the skywalks' collapse behind it." Each of the approximately 1,600 hotel occupants from that night was unconditionally offered , and 1,300 of them accepted by the deadline. Every defendantincluding Hallmark Cards, Crown Center Corporation, architects, engineers, and the contractordenied all legal liability, including that of the egregious engineering faults. In 1983, local authorities reported that the $5 million hotel reconstruction made the building "possibly the safest in the country."
The disaster provides a case study teaching first responders the "all-hazards approach" to multiple disciplines across jurisdictions, and teaching university students in engineering ethics classes how the smallest personal responsibility can impact the biggest projects with the worst possible results.