114 People Died Because an Engineer Didn't Recheck the Math. That Was 45 Years Ago Today.
The Hyatt Regency skywalk collapse killed 114 people at a tea dance in Kansas City on July 17, 1981, and it happened because a steel fabricator changed a connection detail and the structural engineer approved it without recalculating the load. Forty-five years later, the question every hotel owner should be asking isn't whether their building is safe... it's whether anyone in their chain of command is actually checking.