In 1985 a judge found the structural engineers for the Hyatt Regency Hotel guilty of gross negligence in the July 17, 1981 collapse of two suspended walkways in the hotel lobby that killed 114 and injured 200 people. Many of those killed were dancing on the 32-ton walkways when an arrangement of rods and box beams suspending them from the ceiling failed.

The judge found the project manager guilty of “a conscious indifference to his professional duties as the Hyatt project engineer who was primarily responsible for the preparation of design drawings and review of shop drawings for that project.” He also concluded that the chief engineer’s failure to closely monitor the project manager’s work betrayed “a conscious indifference to his professional duties as an engineer of record.” Responsibility for the collapse, it was decided, lay in the engineering design for the suspended walkways. Expert testimony claimed that even the original beam design fell short of minimum safety standards. Substantially less safe, however, was the design that actually was used.5 Use the Engineering Ethics Matrix to analyze the ethical issues that occurred in this case.