Hyatt Walkway

In Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, in 1981, connections supported the ceiling rods holding up the second and the fourth floor walkways has failed and collapsed and fell down on the first floor where was so crowded then and resulted in 114 deaths and over 200 injuries. Beside of the loss of lives, this collapse left millions dollars in cost behind and a number of principals lost their engineering licenses and number of firms went bankruptcy. As for the events triggered this collapse affecting the thousands of people adversely, the most critical and important factor was the change of the design of the hanger rod connections from one-rod to two-rod system to make the assembly task simpler doubling the load on the connector. Improper design utilizing abrupt section changes, resulting in stress concentrations Degradation of materials in a connection. Improper design due to lack of consideration of all forces acting on a connection, especially those associated with volume changes. Lack of consideration of large residual stresses resulting from manufacture or fabrication. These are the most important structural factors caused of the walkway collapse. And it is resulted from the conflictual and controversial communication between the Havens Steel Company and G.C.E International Inc. This can be deemed as the most important factor triggered the walkway collapse because of the fact that these two professional engineering companies obviously were not able to communicate each other in professional bounders and haven’t acted in a responsible way and understood the importance of the job they were doing. G.C.E International Inc., Daniel M. Duncan and Jack D. Gillum is the most blame for walkway collapse because of charging gross negligence, incompetence, misconduct and unprofessional conduct in the practice of engineering in connection with their performance of engineering services in the design and construction of the Hyatt Regency Hotel.
G.C.E International Inc.