EVENT
Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse
The July 17, 1981 collapse of suspended walkways in a Kansas City hotel, killing 114 people — caused by a construction modification that doubled the load on a connection detail without anyone recognizing the change's significance, and the canonical case of how small, apparently minor design changes can consume the factor of safety in ways reviewers fail to detect.
On the evening of July 17, 1981, during a tea dance in the atrium of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, two suspended walkways on the second and fourth floors collapsed onto the crowd below. One hundred and fourteen people died. More than two hundred were injured. The investigation traced the failure to a construction modification. The original design called for walkways suspended from the ceiling by continuous hanger rods — rods running from the roof to the lower walkway through the upper walkway. During construction, the design was modified: instead of continuous rods, the upper walkway would be supported by one set of rods from the ceiling, and the lower walkway would be hung from a separate set of rods attached to a beam on the upper walkway. The modification appeared minor. It simplified
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