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Hyatt Regency Walkway Disaster

Three key lessons can be learned from the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse disaster: 1) engineers are responsible for ensuring structures are built as planned, not just designing them on paper; 2) engineers should be consulted about any design changes during construction; and 3) engineers should verify the final structure to identify potential failure sources or risk-increasing changes. To prevent future disasters, engineers must learn from past flaws and improve practices around rigorous design, material limitations, structural integrity, and accounting for loads and forces on structures. Risk assessment and adaptive practices can also help reduce risks, but resilience and risk analysis must work together with traditional design to adequately protect communities.

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55 views3 pages

Hyatt Regency Walkway Disaster

Three key lessons can be learned from the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse disaster: 1) engineers are responsible for ensuring structures are built as planned, not just designing them on paper; 2) engineers should be consulted about any design changes during construction; and 3) engineers should verify the final structure to identify potential failure sources or risk-increasing changes. To prevent future disasters, engineers must learn from past flaws and improve practices around rigorous design, material limitations, structural integrity, and accounting for loads and forces on structures. Risk assessment and adaptive practices can also help reduce risks, but resilience and risk analysis must work together with traditional design to adequately protect communities.

Uploaded by

zimaox
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Hyatt Regency Walkway Disaster

Method of negating/preventing such incident take place in the future

If we look at the recent history of construction, we discover that it is riddled with a range of

faults, from minor cosmetic types to those that are truly catastrophic. Most failures can be

avoided by following rigorous design practices and understanding the limitations of using

materials.
Although no construction system can be designed and built to be absolutely risk-free, risk-

based assessment and decision-making can reduce the risk of a gradual collapse. According to

the researchers, engineers should not only work with the minimum building code

requirements; they should consider ways to improve structural integrity and strength to

accommodate local failures.

Based on the Hyatt Regency collapse, the simple explanation for this defect is obvious: the

support bars simply could not manage the weight of the walkways and the crowd. A more

detailed breakdown of the collapse support bars includes the weight forces of the bridges and

the forces that hold the bridges high on supports.

When selecting materials, engineers should anticipate how the material can contribute to

failure. If it is a floor, will it be too slippery? If it is adjacent to a heat source, can it tolerate

temperature changes? Regarding humidity, keep in mind that many materials are food for

mold, and steps should be taken to allow them to dry out if wet. In addition, wood is

particularly dimensionally sensitive to changes in humidity and humidity. If it dries too much,

it will crack. If it gets too wet, it will expand and bend. Give priority to the continuity of the

building envelope and think carefully about what happens with each change of equipment and

aircraft. The building envelope must permanently resist heat transfer and block the movement

of air and water from side to side. In addition, buildings moves, caused by gravity, wind, and

seismic forces. Construction materials and assemblies should be selected and designed to

accommodate these forces and not to transfer loads onto materials that cannot tolerate them.
Many lessons can be learned from this disaster; the first one is that engineers are responsible

not only for the design of the structures, but also for ensuring that implemented as planned. It

is not enough to simply design a paper structure to calculate the loads and choose the

materials. It is imperative that engineers be consulted about design changes at each stage of

construction Finally, engineers should also be responsible for administering a final

verification of structure finished. As designers, they would be better qualified to find possible

sources of failure and identify changes that increase the risk of accidents. Thus, engineers

must learn from the the flaws and improve. If the engineers never make the same mistake

twice, disasters like the collapse of the Hyatt Regency walkway can be avoided and many

lives can be saved.


Changes to existing design and management practices are needed to implement thinking

about resilience, including: a deviation from problem solving in favor of adaptive

management, the recognition that knowledge of complex systems is necessarily incomplete;

and a break from traditional design processes that focus on modes of integrated security

operation in addition to integrated security. However, neither resilience nor risk analysis is

sufficient to mitigate the impacts of disasters. Both approaches must work together to

adequately protect communities.


Orr, S. and Robinson, W., 1983. The hyatt regency skywalk collapse: An EMS-based disaster

response. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 12(10), pp.601-605.


Preventing Construction Failures
Elias Saltz - https://www.conspectusinc.com/blog/2018/04/preventing-construction-failures

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