Kansas City Hyatt Walkway Collapse

Kansas city Hyatt paseo Collapse Introduction The Hyatt Regency Hotel was built in Kansas City, Missouri in 1978. This hotel consisted of a 40-story hotel tower and assemblage facilities, which were connected by an open concept atrium. In facial expression the atrium, there were three walkways that connected the hotel to the conference facilities on the second, third, and quartern al-Qaidas. The atrium was 145 feet long, 117 feet wide and 50 feet high. On July 17, 1981, approximately 2,000 people had gathered in the atrium to insert in and watch a dance contest.Dozens stood on the walkways. At 705 PM, the walkways on the second, third, and fourth floor were packed with visitors as they watched over the active lobby, which was also full of people. The fourth floor bridge was suspend directly over the second floor bridge, with the third floor walkway set off to the side several meters away from the other two. Construction issues led to a subtle but flawed protrude change that dou bled the profane on the connection between the fourth floor walkway embody beams and the tie rods carrying the weight of the second floor walkway.This new design could barely handle the dead load weight of the structure itself, much less the weight of the spectators standing on it. The connection failed and both walkways crashed nonpareil on top of the other and then into the lobby below, killing 114 people and injuring more than 200 others. Mainbody FIG-1 FIG-2 Originally, the second and 4th floor walkways were to be suspended from the same rod (as shown in fig-1) and held in place by shabus.The preliminary design sketches contained a note specifying a strength of 413 MPa for the hanger rods which was omitted on the final structural drawings. quest the general notes in the absence of a specification on the drawing, the contractor used hanger rods with only 248 MPa of strength. This fender design, however, was highly impractical because it called for a nut 6. 1 meters up the h anger rod and did not use limb nuts. The contractor modified this detail to use 2 hanger rods instead of one (as shown in fig-2) and the engineer sanctioned the design change without checking it.This design change doubled the stress exerted on the nut under the fourth floor beam. Now this nut supported the weight of 2 walkways instead of just one Conclution FIG-3 FIG-4 un eat up the original nor the as-built design for the hanger rod satisfied the Kansas City building code making the connection ill inevitable. If, however, the building design had contained more redundancy this failure may not have resulted in the complete collapse of the walkway.Kaminetzky (1991) suggests two much stronger design alternatives for the connectors. The toe-to-toe packs used in the Hyatt Regency provided for weak conjoin which allowed the nut to pull through the channel/box beam assembly initiating the collapse. A back-to-back channel design using web stiffeners when necessary (fig-3) or the use of bearing crossplates in conjunction with the toe-to-toe channels (fig-4) would have made the connection much stronger making it much more difficult for the nut to pull throughReferences Engineering Ethics Lessons Learned Kansas City Hyatt Walkway Collapse http//www. pdhengineer. com/Course%20Web/Law%20and%20Ethics%20Courses/hyatt_walkway_collapse. htm Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse. School of Engineering, University of Alabama. http//www. eng. uab. edu/cee/faculty/ndelatte/case_studies_project/Hyatt%20Regency/hyatt. htmCauses Kaminetzky, Dov, Design and Construction Failures Lessons from Forensic Investigations (1991). McGraw-Hill, New York, N. Y.