Case: Walkway Collapse (Hyatt Regency)

Walkway Collapse (Hyatt Regency)

The tragic 1981 Kansas City Hyatt Regency walkway collapse received extensive coverage in The New York Times some four years after its occurrence. Here is how a November 16, 1985 article begins:

KANSAS CITY Mo., Nov. 15--A state judge today found the structural engineers for the Hyatt Regency Hotel guilty of "gross negligence" in the 1981 collapse of two suspended walkways in the hotel lobby that killed 114 people.

Many of those killed were dancing on the 32-ton walkways July 17, 1981, when an arrangement of rods and box beams suspending them from the ceiling failed. Others of the dead and 200 injured were crushed under the structures.

Judge James B. Deutsch, an administrative law judge for Missouri’s Administrative hearing commission, in a 442-page ruling, found the structural engineers guilty of gross negligence, misconduct and unprofessional conduct.

One day before the judge’s decision, the American Society of Engineers (ASCE) announced a policy of holding structural engineers responsible for all aspects of structural safety in their building designs. This policy resulted from the deliberations of an ASCE committee named in 1983 to address questions raised by the disaster.

Judge Deutsch found the project manger 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.

This court case shows that engineers can be held responsible, not only for their own conduct, but also for the conduct of others under their supervision. It also holds that engineers have special professional responsibilities, and it seems to acknowledges the importance of engineering societies in articulating and supporting those responsibilities. Discuss the extent to which you think engineering societies should play the sort of role ASCE did in this case. To what extent do you think practicing engineers should support (e.g., by becoming members) professional engineering societies’s attempts to articulate and interpret the ethical responsibilities of engineers.

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