When Bob Berkebile rushed to the chaotic scene of the Hyatt Regency disaster, his first thought was, Did I kill these people?
It was the night of July 17, 1981. Berkebile and his wife, Libby, were on their way to a dinner party in the Lakewood neighborhood. As they rounded the southern edge of downtown Kansas City, the couple couldn't help but notice the wailing of sirens and a staggering parade of speeding firetrucks. When they arrived at the party, Berkebile says, the hostess met them in the yard and rushed them inside to the TV news reports.
At 7:05 that evening, as a live band began playing "Satin Doll" for hundreds of spectators and dancers, the fourth-story skywalks at the Hyatt Regency Hotel collapsed, catapulting dozens of people into the air and sending twisted metal and slabs of concrete onto the packed lobby floor.
Berkebile jumped back in the car and rushed to the Hyatt. By the time he arrived, less than an hour after the collapse, the area was choked with shocked spectators and frantic family members. The entry was lined with police. Berkebile walked up to the first one he saw and told the officer who he was: the architect in charge of the hotel's design.
He was ushered inside. Pipes torn away from the walls pumped water onto the scene. Arms and legs jutted from the debris. Police officers tried to extract lifeless victims in blood-soaked clothing; fatal gashes left skulls exposed. Bodies piled up five-high on a wooden pallet in the corner of the dust- and exhaust-filled lobby. An adjoining conference room, prepared for a floral convention, quickly became a makeshift morgue.
Rain speckled the ambulances that buzzed between the Crown Center hotel and Truman Medical Center, until rescue workers delicately extracted the last survivor at 4:30 a.m. Three hours later, construction workers peeled away the last concrete slab, revealing 31 bodies. A police spokesman announced that all of the victims had been recovered.
The final count: 114 dead, 216 injured.
"I spent a really long night on the rescue team. And as we were pulling those dead people, those seriously injured people, out, I was confronting totally new questions," Berkebile says.
He had been one of two principal architects in charge of the design of the Hyatt skywalks. Not even 24 hours after the collapse, accusations flew from city officials and local architects: The design was flawed; any skilled practitioner could have seen that the airy bridges, suspended by just a handful of inch-thick steel rods, would fail. The lawsuits and investigations that followed ate up most of Berkebile's time for nearly two straight years. He spent more hours than he can count in conference rooms, staring at lawyers, going over what, up to that time, was the nation's most deadly structural failure.
"It was surreal, just ugly," Berkebile says of the legal process.
Tom Nelson, a partner in Berkebile's architecture firm, says he was convinced of two things in the aftermath of the collapse. First, he was certain that it wasn't the architects' fault. He was right. The National Bureau of Standards determined that the engineers, not the architects, had made a fatal mistake in calculating the strength of the hanger rods. But Nelson was also convinced that any company with a connection to the disaster would never resurrect its business.
"I went to an interview for a project two days after to make the point to the staff, to make a point to everybody that, despite this horrible thing, we were going to stay in business," he says. "But I didn't believe it."
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He's still designing useless crap. It just hasn't killed anyone. Yet.
Again, I strongly think that only very careful construction especially during the beginning stages and especially during the completion stages of such skywalks, making absolutely sure that all the necessary, very strong, magnetic bolts, and henges connecting the skywalks to each end of the hotel, would have prevented thus Hyatt Regency Skywalk tragedy.
Furthermore, I really feel that because the Hyatt Regency Skywalks were not nearly enough strongly bolted and connected to the very strong and permanent walls of the Hyatt Regency, especially with a lot of extra weight, the Hyatt Skywalks definately collapsed.
Karen L
at 21:07 Hours, Central-Daylight-Time
on Wednesday, July 13, 2011.
Sam - as the article states, the engineer is at fault, not Bob. Architects don't determine the structural details. That takes a Structural Engineer with a stamp. Had the engineer recommended that the skywalks needed a different structural design, he would have obliged.
Sam - as the article states, the engineer is at fault, not Bob. Architects don't determine the structural details. That takes a Structural Engineer with a stamp. Had the engineer recommended that the skywalks needed a different structural design, he would have obliged.
I walked across those sky walks a few days before they collasped. And I remember thinking, I can't wait to get to the other side. They swayed back and forth with weight from people walking on them. If you stood still you could feel it. Like in a sky scraper.
The K.C.Star did numerous stories on the fall. If I am not mistaken the key component to the collaspe was not the thin rods, but the nuts that were under the slabs of concrete that where attached to the rods. They failed to hold the weight and the motion of people swaying back and forth on the walk ways. Bottom line it was a bad design. Nice in theory. Looked pretty. But a lot of people died.
You can glam up his back ground all you want. But at some point there where a few things that were missed in the calculations on how this structure would be used and how thin rods with very thin nuts were going to hold up tons of concrete and steel and then throw in some kinetic energy to boot.
Those people that died where there to have fun. They never saw it coming. One guy had to have his legs cut off with a chain saw to seperate him from the concrete. He was on the front page of one of the Star Issues.
If you want to do a article of substance on this subject. Try tracking down the survivors and see how they are doing and what there opion is on this guy and his green ideas.
Sam Dawson
I walked across those sky walks a few days before they collasped. And I remember thinking, I can't wait to get to the other side. They swayed back and forth with weight from people walking on them. If you stood still you could feel it. Like in a sky scraper. The K.C.Star did numerous stories on the fall. If I am not mistaken the key component to the collaspe was not the thin rods, but the nuts that were under the slabs of concrete that where attached to the rods. They failed to hold the weight and the motion of people swaying back and forth on the walk ways. Bottom line it was a bad design. Nice in theory. Looked pretty. But a lot of people died. You can glam up his back ground all you want. But at some point there where a few things that were missed in the calculations on how this structure would be used and how thin rods with very thin nuts were going to hold up tons of concrete and steel and then throw in some kinetic energy to boot. Those people that died where there to have fun. They never saw it coming. One guy had to have his legs cut off with a chain saw to seperate him from the concrete. He was on the front page of one of the Star Issues. If you want to do a article of substance on this subject. Try tracking down the survivors and see how they are doing and what there opion is on this guy and his green ideas. Sam Dawson
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