). When did the Hyatt collapse? 2). Who built the Hyatt Regency walkway? 3). Who were the Hyatt Regency guest on the walkway and what events were they attending? 4). What major business goals of the Hyatt Regency were Impacted? 5). How did the walkway collapse effect customer service? 6). How did the walkway collapse effect the production schedule of the Hotel? 7). Could the Hyatt Recency prevent the collapse by working with the engineers evaluating the risk assessment of the construction company to avoid the walkway from collapsing? 8). In the view of the Hyatt Regency, what was the root cause of the walkway

collapse? 9). How much financially did the Hyatt Regency have to pay out injured victims and their families. 10) How was the walkway repaired and how did the Hyatt Regency gain consumer confidence for guest to return staying at the Hyatt Regency?

In July 1980, the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, opened for business, boasting among its design features a multistory atrium with three suspended walkways-a fourth-story walkway spanning directly above a walkway on the second floor, with a third-story walkway offset by a few meters. One year after the opening, the walkways on the second and fourth stories collapsed under the weight of partygoers, killing 114 people in one of the most devastating structural failures in U.S. history in terms of lives lost. Our story unfolds at the Kansas City Hyatt-Regency Hotel in 1981. At the time, the Hyatt was new, modern, slick, and impressive. Construction began in May, 1978, and the hotel opened July 1 1980. The main attraction in the hotel lobby was an atrium spanned by 3 pedestrian walkways at the second, third, and fourth floors suspended from the roof. The bridge on the fourth floor was located above that on the second; the third floor bridge was offset. Each bridge was roughly 12 feet long, weighed 64,000 pounds, and was suspended by three pairs o hangars at the ends and at uniform intervals. It was a pretty cool place to hold events-and so it happened that on July 17,1981 , just over a year after the hotel had first opened, roughly 1,600 people gathered in the lobby to watch (or participate in) a dance competition. The walkways offered a great location to watch from, so about 40 people gathered on the one on the second floor and roughly 20 were on the one on the fourth floor. The weight from those people, apparently, was too much for the walkways t withstand; the fourth floor collapsed on the second, and both then fell down on the lobby floc 111 people died immediately, 3 died later in the hospital, and 216 were injured. The collapse was traced to failure of the connections between the fourth-story box beams an the hanger rods supporting the second-story and fourth-story walkways. An investigation revealed that the original design sketches had called for the two walkways to be suspended b To make matters worse, no one knew who to blame. Investigations dragged on for months. The Hyatt had started construction in 1978, and opened in 1980. It was the 40 -story anchor in a fashionable commercial complex called the Crown Center, and would be the tallest building in the state of Missouri until 1986. Owned by Hallmark, Inc., the building's design was unique but not particularly complicated. Some witnesses said they saw the walkways swaying and bouncing with people's movement, but in a statement two days after the collapse, Pat Foley, president of the Hyatt Hotel chain, insisted "the catwalks were designed to hold people shoulder to shoulder, as many as you can jam in there." In February of 1982, survivors and their families finally got some answers. During construction of the hotel, design elements had been changed. As the Kansas City Public Library's KC History describes it, "The original design had called for sets of support rods to suspend the fourth and second floor walkways from the ceiling. Instead, the designs were changed so that a second set of rods hung the second floor walkway from the fourth floor walkway. This arrangement made the upper walkway support its own weight as well as the weight from the walkway below instead of suspending all of the weight directly from the stronger ceiling supports." Held only by small nuts and undersized washers, the rods ripped through the box beams that day. Investigators ruled out the weight or motion of walkway guests as a significant factor in the collapse. In fact, support was deemed inefficient for the weight of the walkways by themselves. The decision was likely made to save time and money. Somehow, the construction passed inspection. After the collapse, the engineers lost their licenses but no criminal charges were filed. The engineer on record told investigators that the final build was based on a hastily made design concept that never should have been built, and the required approval for it was gained over the phone. During building, the requisite engineering supervision was delegated, and subcontractors were hired to complete the skywalks. The Crown Center Development Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Hallmark, paid $140 million in damages to victims and their families. Mark Williams spent two months in the hospital. His leg turned black and became so swollen than doctors made incisions to relieve the pressure. After his kidneys shut down, he went on dialysis. Through it, he performed physical therapy and eventually graduated to a wheelchair, then crutches, then a cane. Feeling returned to his leg and he began to walk independently, though with a limp. a single set of hanger rods threaded through the upper walkway box beams and terminating beneath the box beams of the lower walkway. Although that design proved to be in violation of Kansas City's minimum load requirements, the primary cause of the failure was a change from the original design to a double-rod system, one hanger rod connecting the ceiling to the upper walkway and the other connecting the lower and upper walkways. This change had the effect of doubling the load on the upper walkway connections, resulting in a design capable of withstanding only an estimated 30 percent of the mandated minimum. The engineer of record attributed the fatal design flaw to a breakdown in communication. He stated that he had assigned supervision of the project to an associate structural engineer, who was not an ASCE member. As the engineer of record was responsible for roughly 10 associate engineers, each of whom supervised six or seven projects at a time, he acknowledged that he could not personally oversee every aspect of the design. Instead, he entrusted the responsibility to the associate in charge of each project. The engineer of record further contended that it was common practice in the industry for the structural engineer to leave the design of steel-to-steel connections to the fabricator. The original design provided in the structural drawings was intended only to be conceptual. When the fabricators found that design to be impracticable, they requested approval of the double-rod system by telephone. The structural engineer verbally approved the change, with the understanding that a written request for the change would be submitted for formal approval. This follow-up request was never honored. In fact, the fabricators had just begun work on the shop drawings when a sudden increase in workload required them to subcontract the work to an outside detailer. That detailer, in turn, mistakenly believed that the double-rod connection on the shop drawings had already been designed and therefore performed no calculations on the connection himself. The design documents were returned to the engineer of record with a request for expedited approval. He assigned review to a technician on his staff; however, the connections were not detailed on the drawings and the technician did not perform calculations on the connections. The structural engineer performed "spot checks" on portions of the shop drawings, and the engineer of record affixed his seal to the documents. The latter stated that he had not personally checked all calculations and had relied on the work of his project engineer and design team (Morin C. \& Fischer C., 2007. The Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse) When this hotel skywalk collapsed, it was one of the deadliest structural failures US history After the Hyatt Regency tragedy, Kansas City would never be the same The Hyatt Regency walkway collapse killed 114 people and injured more than 200; 18 pairs of husbands and wives perished. The disaster left thousands of family members with decades of pain, grief, depression, anger, and resentment. Kansas City was plunged into despair. "I found out more of what I was made of and maybe became not so self-centered," Williams told Star Magazine. "Most people are never tested, so they never find out what they can be." About 10 years later, Williams returned to the hotel. He "felt drawn" to the spot where he lay crushed under tons of broken building. Above him, construction crews had repaired the damage - installing one second-floor walkway, supported by columns rather than suspension rods. It wasn't until 2009 that Hallmark donated \$25,000 to a memorial fund for victims and rescue workers. Hyatt said it would not contribute, as the hotel location was now a Sheraton. The latter donated $5,000. The Skywalk Memorial was dedicated on November 12, 2015 in Hospital Hill Park, which lies in the shadow of the former Hyatt Regency (Buck S. Aug 1, 2017). Root Cause Analysis Problem Outline: The collapse was totally unexpected; this wasn't an old, run-down building where one might think twice about the structural integrity of where one walks. This was a new, modern, clearly expensive place that you wouldn't think twice setting foot in. The walkways themselves were certainly modern and visually impressive, but their design was not particularly innovative or revolutionary-nothing about them would cause the average person to think, "be cautious, it's the first of its kind, tread lightly." They looked solid; they were not. The disaster at the Hyatt was the deadliest structural collapse in American history, until the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11. In some cases, a degree of failure is expected. When implementing an innovative design or perfecting some new technology, setbacks are the price of progress. However, this is not one of those stories. What happened at the Kansas City Hyatt-Regency Hotel was the result of a number of project management errors that combined to permit a fatal construction design problem to be installed in the bridges' support system. The good news: there are relatively simple solutions to the problem that can be enacted. The bad news: the problem was caught only when people died. Root Cause Analysis is no stranger to structural failure. When something this big goes this wrong, it is critical to understand exactly what happened-not just that the walkway fell or even that a miscalculation was evidently made, but also how every contributing factor came to exist and why errors were not caught earlier. The cause of this tragic incident can be investigated by building a Cause Map, a visual Root Cause Analysis, which shows the cause and effect relationships between the different factors that contributed to the collapse. Root Cause Analysis will help us analyze the collapse and implement solutions to ensure that it never happens again. The Root Cause Analysis of the walkway disaster identifies the walkway collapse and the injuries sustained as the central problems. Because Root Cause Analysis investigations lead from the goals to various problems, here we are just trying to give ourselves a sketch of the incident based on known facts; we will find other "problems" in the analysis phase of our investigation, but for now we list the major, obvious problems and move on. Root Cause Analysis also requires that we capture the date and time, as well as any differences present at the time, or what made this day and time different from any other. The disaster occurred on July 17,1981 , around 7:05 PM; the difference on this day was that there were more people than usual on the walkways, and some of them may have been dancing or swaying, creating more movement than usual on the walkways. To continue with our Root Cause Analysis problem outline, we also must specify the location (a hotel in Kansas City, Missouri), and the process being undertaken at the time (a dance competition). Finally, our Root Cause Analysis problem outline details the impact that the incident had on the goals of the organization in question, which in this case would be the Hyatt hotel. Root Cause Analysis involves being as specific in defining a given organization's goals as it is in defining the problem. All organizations have multiple goals in common. It is good business to ensure the safety of employees and the public, remain within budget, achieve the intended purpose of the organization, avoid damaging property, and do it all as efficiently as possible. In Root Cause Analysis, these elements are understood in terms of safety, property, production, and labor goals. Just as Root Cause Analysis of any incident considers multiple problems, it also asks how those problems affected multiple goals. Root Cause Analysis always thinks about "the problem" in relation to the impact the issue under investigation had on the organization's overall goals. Customer deaths are never part of a hotel's business plan; ideally, everyone who walks in the doors will walk out of them in much the same condition. The deaths and injuries thus can be said to have affected the safety goal. Similarly, hotels don't like to be known for disaster. The public relations fallout that resulted from the walkway collapse clearly affected the hotel's reputation, which our Root Cause Analysis calls the customer goal. The hotel also had to be repaired after the walkway collapse, a costly endeavor that impacted the customer service and production goals (Think Reliable, Root Cause blog, 2021). Discussion Questions: Please respond with short answers. 1). When did the Hyatt collapse? 2). Who built the Hyatt Regency walkway? 3). Who were the Hyatt Regency guest on the walkway and what events were they attending? 4). What major business goals of the Hyatt Regency were Impacted? 5). How did the walkway collapse effect customer service? 6). How did the walkway collapse effect the production schedule of the Hotel? 7). Could the Hyatt Recency prevent the collapse by working with the engineers evaluating the risk assessment of the construction company to avoid the walkway from collapsing? 8). In the view of the Hyatt Regency, what was the root cause of the walkway collapse? 9). How much financially did the Hyatt Regency have to pay out injured victims and their families. 10) How was the walkway repaired and how did the Hyatt Regency gain consumer confidence for guest to return staying at the Hyatt Regency