Hyatt Hotels has decided not to contribute to a memorial in a park across the street from the hotel in Kansas City where a skywalk collapse in the summer of 1981 killed 114 people.
Their lame-ass reason? “It’s not our hotel anymore, it’s a Sheraton.”
What a bunch of fucking pricks.
I can sort of see their point. Why contribute a bunch of money for what is essentially bad publicity – a big monument that says “Hyatt screwed up very badly here 30 years ago”
And frankly, if I ever die in some stupid pointless accident, I’d rather someone started a scholarship or something rather than drop $600K on a glorified tombstone.
Wasn’t a lack of (proper) support what got them in trouble in the first place?
Pretty much this. Or send another $5000 to all the families of the victims and put up a fancy $30,000 historical marker.
I’m also curious as to the purity of the foundation’s motives and if they are paying themselves minimum wage (or less) for their efforts. I suspect it could be a case of, “hey, a lucrative multi-year gig!”
According to the comments on the linked article, Hyatt did not design or build the building.
Not exactly. As Baal Houtham says, they didn’t design or build the place. In fact, it wasn’t a bad design and would have worked perfectly, but IIRC the contractor cheaped out on some bolts or something and didn’t tell anyone. I sincerely hope whoever was responsible got serious charges.
No, it was a fucking stupid design. The design called for the contractor to run a nut up ~20’ of threaded rod six times. Idiot-proofing things for work crews is a big concern in design, it obviously wasn’t considered well enough here. The contractor obviously didn’t do the right thing either, but MO’s licensing board felt strongly enough about it to revoke a bunch of PEs because of it.
It was 30 years ago. Why are they putting up a memorial now?
The two engineers responsible lost their engineering licenses in Missouri, and moved to other states, and the engineering company lost its engineering certificate.
Basically what happened was, the original design was for something called a single hanger rod box beam connection. Basically, it was a single long support rod that would have gone up through the building. The problem was, these rods were expensive and hard to make, so the steel company which was subcontracting with the engineers proposed a change, where instead of a single rod going up through the building, there would be two rods offset, which would be easier to make and install, which was accepted by the engineers (the engineering company disputes this, claiming that that there wasn’t any such conversation). The problem was, the original design was barely strong enough, and making the changes weakened the structure even more. And, actually, during construction, part of the roof collapsed.
This is usually one of the cases discussed in an Engineering Disasters course…it’s definitely still relevant.
And it was a dick move on Hyatt’s part if they had promised to contribute…but that amount of money could also be put to better use (scholarships, donations to engineering schools in the state, etc.).
In one of his books, Henry Petroski described the accident and the cause.
It’s discussed in To Engineer is Human (Chapter 8).
I live in Topeka, not too far from KC. On the Wednesday before the collapse there was an article in our paper about a mariachi band, Mariachi Estrella, that was unique for having all it’s members be female. They’d been playing together for about a year. The next night, Thursday, I saw them playing at the annual Mexican fiesta, here in Topeka, a benefit for the parish school of Our Lady of Guadalupe. About twenty-four hours after I saw them four out of seven of them were dead, dying in the Hyatt disaster.
Hyatt could have put it a token amount.
Bolding Mine
They got that feeling from the financial responsibility that was imposed on them for granting licenses to engineers who create dangerous designs. My annual PE fees jumped considerably after that incident and didn’t subside until a few years ago.
I can see the Hyatt’s reluctance to participate in this. Every engineer in the world and just about everybody in Missouri and Kansas knows what you’re talking about if you say “Hyatt Disaster”. The Hyatt name is stuck on a very dark piece of history which they had only a very innocent part in creating.
Still, they should man up and contribute out of compassion for their patrons and employees that were all harmed in that incident.
OK, this is something that I know a very large amount about. A good friend of mine is the doctor who performed the triage at the scene, climbing underneath the collapsed skywalks to rescue people, who was the one who had to decide who could be saved and who could only be given painkillers and a priest.
And I’ve read the Kansas City Star’s Pulitizer winning series about it.
The original design was OK. It specified two U shaped pieces welded together at the sides. That was modified by the steel contractor to two U shaped pieces welded together at the top and bottom, so the motherfucking HOLES went through the motherfucking WELDS. And the modified design specified square reenforcing plates, which were not installed. The fault lies with the steel fabricator and the installer. If the plans had been followed, the skybridges would still be up there.
Also, Hyatt is to blame. Remember, a large roof section had collapsed while the place was being built. Hyatt was in a hurry to get it built (the electrical system had installation problems as well). The city inspectors were to blame - they should have caught all these problems, and I suspect there were bribes being paid to rubber-stamp things so the hotel could open on time.
The only non-corrupt person I can find is Jack D. Gillum, the structural engineer, who has spent a good portion of the rest of his life castigating himself for accepting the shoddy redesign by the lazy sons of bitches at Haven Steel.
The change that matter was that the contractor cut the tie-rods. The design had each walkway supported directly on the tie-rod. The contractor changed it so that the lower walkway would hang from the upper walkway, and not the tie-rod itself. That doubled the load, and was the main cause of failure. A good diagram is here (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/HRWalkway.svg).
I don’t like memorials. They only please the sentimental and emotional folks, and do nothing to compensate for loss or make the world a better place.
So I’d rather donated monies go to compensation funds or scholarships or whatever.
But if Hyatt’s not donating any money, then they completely suck. I don’t care if they were legalistically free from guilt or not. Being a “do-gooder” doesn’t hurt them at all.
Hyatt was pushing the project to extremes, as demonstrated by the fact that this was the second major structural failure at that hotel. If the 2,700 square feet of roof struts had collapsed on a day when construction workers were there, lives would have been lost. It should have been a wake-up call.
The design of the skybridges was intended to provoke a “Jesus Christ!” reaction from visitors, that it should shock them.
Hyatt is not a developer, how are they responsible? I just read about this and it is the development corporation Crown Center that was responsible for the building and it seems they were held legally responsible also.
You know a doctor and you read the paper. With due respect, are you a licensed Professional Engineer? Because I am, and given that I live in KC I’ve studied a bit about it myself, and I disagree with your summary.
Why did they trust a welded channel beam over a simple box beam with no welds? It turns out that the engineer who designed that, Dan Duncan, had never made such a design before, especially one using MC8x8.5 channels. Would you care to give me your analysis on that point? I have made a similar design, in my brief stint as a design Engineer, and I used a box beam.
The original design had that as well. See Detail Section 11 of sheet S405.1 of the sealed design drawings. This design was sealed by Jack Gillum, PE. Furthermore, the sheet only showed the bottom connection of the 2nd and 3rd-floor bridges, not the mid-span connections. Detail 51 of sheet A508 shows the insanely long threaded fasteners, which were an incredibly unorthodox and poor design. The fabricator claims they phoned the Engineer about this, something that the Engineer disputed in court. The fabricator claims Duncan was the one who suggested moving the rod over, creating a joint in shear. Fabricator’s shop drawing number 30 shows the poor design. The fabricator, WRW, admits they did no design calculations on this, and they were not licensed Professional Engineers. Then the guy who checked the shop drawing wasn’t an Engineer, he was a technician who flunked the PE exam (Jantosik) but liked to call himself an “engineer.” However, Duncan, the real PE, reputedly told Jantosik that the 2-rod shear design was “essentially the same” as the single-rod design. Jantosik put a stamp on the design, which was skirting or over the edge of legality (the details are too lengthy to get into here), as he was not a PE.
In short, you’re wrong, the holes went through the welds in both designs. See this clip from a document from the legal review by Shughart Thomson & Kilroy:
http://www.coalgoddess.net/files/Pictures/1112/Before_and_After.jpg
Assuming it could have been built to the design, what are your grounds for saying this? A key dispute in the trial(s) was whether the original, modified, or both designs were faulty. I’ve seen 3D stress analyses which show either way the bridge was unsafe. I’ve also seen ones which show it might have been safe. The point is, it was a fringe design, with an insufficient SF.
You suspect? What is your proof? I have the court transcripts and quite a lot of reports on this, and that doesn’t seem to be what they found was happening.
You may benefit by reviewing the process the design went through, because you are omitting many responsible parties. And Gillum may be a sympathetic figure in the KC Star, but he doesn’t have clean hands. Gillum was a PE and if he didn’t want that responsibility then he should have voluntarily lapsed or surrendered his license. The Administrative Law Judge found he was “vicariously liable” for the accident, and in his testimony of July-August, 1984, he tried to disavow responsibility, claiming it was the steel fabricator’s job to do the Engineering. That dog won’t hunt, so to speak. And recall what I wrote above: See Detail Section 11 of sheet S405.1 of the sealed design drawings. This design was sealed by Jack Gillum, PE.
FTR, the NBS report on the accident apparently said the modified design had an SF of only 1.31. That’s terrifyingly low. To the best of my knowledge the NBS did not assess the original design, but IIRC it comes out as having an SF of 2.5-4, which IMO is much too low, and it relies upon the welds being 1) properly done, 2) not having stress cracking from dynamic loading in the heat-affected-zone (HAZ), and 3) not having sideways loads (such as swaying from people dancing) which would dynamically load the welds in two axes at once. Most of my documents are in hardcopy at my office; if anyone has a link to an SF analysis of the long threaded fastener design, please post it.
