I've Always Been Fascinated By Disaster.

Don't get me wrong, I hate that buildings collapse, ships sink, stages fall on audience members, but I would be lying if I said these things didn't fascinate me. I've always been very interesting in the engineering aspect of structural failures.

Anyway, a lot of people were discussing the stage collapse of the Indiana State Fair that happened just a few hours ago. I somehow found myself to the WikiPedia page of historical structural collapses and found one of the most interesting articles I've found in months, which was about the collapse of the Hyatt Regency walkway collapses in 1981.

I considered myself to be pretty read-up on major historical events. I'm pretty sure everyone of my generation knows about the collapse of The World Trade Center towers, and the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995 that took down part of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. But I had never heard of this disaster that stuck the Hyatt Regency.

Picture It. Kansas City 1981. A beautiful Friday night tea dance was taking place in the lobby of the hotel right below the atrium. There were 3 bridge-ways overlooking the dance floor, and 4th floor bridge was directly over the bridge of the 2nd floor. Luckily, the 3rd floor bridge was a few feet away. Spectators of the dancers were lined up viewing the dances, and all of a sudden the 4th floor bridge-way collapses onto the 2nd floor bridge-way, which causes the 2nd floor bridge-way to collapse as well.

114 people died. 216 were injured.

Before

                                                       After

After

After

Apparently, the failure of the bridge-ways were due to fastening the 2nd floor bridge-way to the 4th floor bridge-way, which doubled the weight. You can read all about it on Wikipedia here: Hyatt Regency Disaster

Interesting enough, the hotel is still open today, but there isn't remembrance of that tragic disaster back in 1981. There is no plaque, no before and after pictures in the lobby (of course there wouldn't be, would there?), nothing informing hotel guests of events of yesteryear.

While I was researching, I also found out about the 2001 incident of The Versailles Wedding Hall Dance Floor Collapse. There really are no words for this one, so I'll just post a video.

I'm posting these 2 events because if I haven't heard of them, I'm quite sure there are others that haven't, and might find them interesting. 1981 and 2001 were not that long ago, and something like this could easily happen again if contractors/engineers/owners cut corners in buildings.

[image source]: Wikipedia, commandsafety.org, and groups.yahoo.com/group/sofiariff.