Hotel Walkway

In 1981, two walkways suspended one above the other in the atrium of the relatively new Hyatt Hotel in Kansas City, MO, suddenly collapsed, killing 114 people and injuring almost 200. This description of the disaster and subsequent actions is based on data and information provided by Delatte (2009), Goodman (1990), and Petroski (1985). 

Notice, from a common sense, personal, and organizational perspective, the ease of understanding and presumably applying the lessons learned. I say presumably because most of the legal and other problems encountered by engineers can be traced to failure to apply common sense practices like those described above. The issue is typically insufficient self and organizational discipline with the result that common sense does not lead to common practice and, as a result, failures occur. 

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Case 14 The Kansas City "Hyatt Regency" Hotel Walkways (1979-1981)... 

The Hyatt Regency Hotel walkways is another example. 

Note how the four functional areas presented in Figure 8.1 interact with each other to result in sormd decisions and optimum structures, facilities, systems, products, or processes. Consider, for example, the iteration between design and construction as illustrated by the hotel walkway collapse described in Chapter 11. In that case, the... 

The collapse of the Hyatt Regency walkways was the result of a flaw in the design process control. However, the post-failure investigation efforts concentrated on design procedures and not on the process. It can well be argued that no clear industry-wide accepted definition of responsibilities existed at the time the hotel was designed and built. 

To design such walkways as those in the Kansas City Hyatt Regency means first to have a general idea of how to span the 120-foot space over the hotel lobby. If this was to be done without obstructions on the floor, then we can imagine how the skywalk concept arose. The idea was to get hotel patrons from one side of the lobby, where their rooms were, to the other side of the lobby, where meeting rooms and a swimming pool were located, without... 

Consider the disaster at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, in Kansas City, on My 17, 1981. Two suspended walkways crowded with people collapsed in the lobby of the hotel, killing 114 people and injuring nearly 200. The cir-cnmstances are well described in Henry Petroski s important book. To Engineer Is Human (1982). The extensive investigations that followed... 

Figure 4.4 Design of walkways in Hyatt Regency Hotel disaster.

On July 17, 1981, during a weekly tea dance, two suspended walkways in the atrium area of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri collapsed, killing 114 people and injuring 185. The collapse was one of the most serious structural failures in the history of the United States. 

The hotel included a 40-story guest room tower, a four-story wing containing restaurants and meeting rooms, and a large, open atrium. The atrium contained three suspended walkways at the second-, third-, and fourth-floor levels which cormected the tower section with the restaurants and meeting rooms. Each walkway was 120 feet long and approximately 8 /2 feet wide. 

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