Introduction

The Hyatt regency hotel disaster is one of the deadliest structural accidents in history. The hotel was located in Kansas City, Missouri in the United States (Bishop and McInerney, 2014). It happened that on the 17^th of July 1981 a tea party was being held on the Hyatt regency hotel (Bishop et al., 2014). A large number of people attended the party this saw a number of them taking to the walkways located on the second, third and fourth flours to have a better view of at the dancers beneath. Unfortunately, the good looking walkways could not support their weight any longer, the walkways on the second and fourth flours came crashing on the unsuspecting party people on the atrium. The incident was fatal, claiming more than 100 lives and injuring approximately 200 people (McEvily & Kasivitamnuay, 2013). An investigation was carried out later on which came to uncover a number of flaws in the structural design of the building. The major one being the fact that the original design of the walkway steel had been altered with. The first issue in this article will be the very first that occurred at the hotel even before its opening. This will then be followed by a scoop on what really caused the tragedy on the 17^th of July 1981.   

Discussion

The first fall.

the 17^thof July 1981 was not the first day that some misconduct had been registered from the walkways in the Hyatt regency hotel (Harris et al., 2013). It happened that before the grand opening of the building, there was an incident when the connections on the northern side of the building failed and the atrium roof collapsed. This incident clearly showed that the building was substandard. The owners of the building were not ready to incur ‘too much cost ‘and thus turned away a request for an on-site inspection. This came to the open in a testimony where a certain company revealed that it had, in three separate occasions, requested for an on-site project representation but their concerns fell into deaf ears. The collapsing of the roof was a big show of structural mistakes in the construction of the building but this did not stop it from being opened later on nonetheless (Harris et al., 2013). This raises a lot of concerns about the credibility of the construction agencies on site. It shows how reluctant they were from meeting their professional responsibilities. Because if they surely did the second tragedy could have been avoided.

Miscommunication.

Initially, the walkways were   supposed to be supported by three pieces of steel metal covering the second floor, the walkway and the roof of the fourth floor (Gist & Lubin, 2013). Havens steel Ltd who was the steel manufacturer changed the initial plan because they believed that the threads would be damaged during the hoisting of the walkway ( Love, Lopez and Edwards,  2013). They therefore proposed that the walkway of the floor number two  four should be supported using two separate sets of threads, those on the fourth floor walkway hanging directly from the ceiling and those on from the second floor walkway hanging from the fourth floor walkway which was directly above it. The steel rods were too weak to hold the full weight of a single walkway, so you can just imagine what happens when the walkways are doubled! This proved to be the biggest mistake that they made and that was paid for so dearly.  

During a court hearing, the steel company alleged that they had called the engineering firm to approve the changes that they were suggesting should be made. The engineering firm denied these claims saying that they did not hear from the Havens steel company about the changes. The claim that the engineering firm did not receive any call about the changes that had been done did not make them more or less innocent. This is due to the fact that they carried on with the construction of the building using a different plan from the one in the fabrication (Love et al., 2013). There were a lot of miss communications between the agencies involved in the building of the hotel which played a major role in the incident.

Wrong planning and calculations

The change of plans was a big issue and it may have contributed largely to the collapsing of the walkways, but after a thorough investigation on the initial plan it was found that it had some major flaws that could have resulted to a similar tragedy

(Martinez and Constantinescu, 2015). The investigation found out that the metals used could not support the weight of a single walkway for this reason it could not pass the Kansas City building code. That having been cited from the initial plan meant that there were some miscalculations during the initial planning which still could have coursed a similar incident to happen. Sources had it that the drawings that were used for the building were just sketches.it also came out later during the trial that the initial fabrication had not been stamped by the design engineer. This shows that the whole project was poorly planned for and contained a lot of errors which caused the massive loss of lives.

Negligence

The first instance of negligence came when the owners of the building were asked by G.C.E, three times to present on-site representation of the project but this was not made possible by the owners because this would bring additional costs with it (Forni et al., 2016). The second instance of negligence was manifested when it was found that the drawings that Havens used were only sketches and not the finalized drawings (Vijayakumar, 2017). This simply means that Havens did not review the drawings or consult with Gillum and associate. Another large measure of negligence was recorded when an engineer accepted a change of plan over the phone without going back to the drawing board and doing fresh calculations and coming up with the scales for the new plan. those instances made the whole process a mess and were the causes of the 17^th of July 1981 tragedy.  

Conclusion

What happened in the Hyatt regency hotel and what followed after, is something that nobody wants to hear of again ever. Many families lost their loved ones, those who survived lost their body parts in the incident and were forced to live with it. Others who saw the sight were traumatized so much that they went ahead and committed suicide. Since then the Hyatt regency hotel tragedy has remained a study model for engineering ethics and errors. The agencies that were involved in the building were fined heavily and their licenses were revoked. The numerous consequences that came up due to the negligence of an engineering team should act as a lesson and a challenge to all those people pursuing careers in the field of engineering.

 Negligence and lack of proper planning were the major issue that lead to the Kansas City hotel tragedy.  Engineers who are not ready to spend more for the purposes of the safety of the public are unethical and unfit for any engineering job anywhere. This is the major reason as to why the of agencies that found guilty of the actions that took place on the Hyatt regency hotel were barred from working through the revoking of their licenses.

References

Bishop, C.D. and McInerney, E.H., 2014. Disproportionate collapse design considerations—A comprehensive approach. In Structures Congress 2014 (pp. 2221-2232).

Forni, D., Chiaia, B. and Cadoni, E., 2016. Strain rate behaviour in tension of S355 steel: Base for progressive collapse analysis. Engineering Structures, 119, pp.164-173.

Gist, R., & Lubin, B. (2013). Response to disaster: Psychosocial, community, and ecological approaches. Routledge.

Harris Jr, C. E., Pritchard, M. S., Rabins, M. J., James, R., & Englehardt, E. (2013). Engineering ethics: Concepts and cases. Cengage Learning.

Love, P.E., Lopez, R. and Edwards, D.J., 2013. Reviewing the past to learn in the future: Making sense of design errors and failures in construction. Structure and Infrastructure Engineering, 9(7), pp.675-688.

Martinez, M.F.L. and Constantinescu, G., 2015. Hyatt Regency Walkway Failure.

McEvily, A. J., & Kasivitamnuay, J. (2013). Metal failures: mechanisms, analysis, prevention. John Wiley & Sons.

Vijayakumar, R. (2017). Hyatt Regency Court Case: How the defense could have won.