Hyatt Regency Hotel walkways

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

The Hyatt Regency Hotel walkways is another example. 

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 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... 

---