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The Disaster That Changed Engineering: The Hyatt Regency Collapse

Tom Scott · 2.7M views · 2017-03-13 · 4:21

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Overview

A Tom Scott guest video by Grady Hillhouse of Practical Engineering on the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. A seemingly minor change to the support design led to catastrophic failure, which is why the case is taught as a lesson to check and double-check everything.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as the standard case study of how a small unchecked design change causes disaster, and of why engineering process and bureaucracy exist.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2017–2021

Topics

Civil engineering & construction
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hyatt regencystructural failureengineering ethicscase studypractical engineering

What people said

dredmorbius · 2021-05 · Recommendation

... buildings don't fall all of sudden... False. Large structural failures can be catastrophic and unexpected. Buildings can and do collapse quite suddenly. The examples here are not necessarily caused by reinforced concrete failures (though several cases make use of reinforced concrete --- generally other failures lead to the collapse). But the final failure of a system under load and near its structural limits can be quite sudden. Taiwan bridge: [LINK] [LINK] Minnesota I35W bridge collapse: [LINK] Jerusalem dance floor: [LINK] Morandi bridge, Italy: [LINK] Hard Rock Hotel New Orleans (under construction): [LINK] Sampoong Department Store, Korea (visualisation): [LINK] The Kansas City Hyatt Regency skywalk collapse (1981) would be another instance. I don't believe there's video of the failure itself, though Grady from Practical Engineering has a great explainer of what went wrong: [VIDEO]

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dredmorbius · 2020-04 · Reference

False premise. Building failures occur all the time. By relative frequency, not so often: physical structures are simpler, tangible, better understood. But they still fail often. [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] In 1st-world countries as well: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]

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jonp888 · 2018-11 · Reference

They do think of that. I've seen old bridges where extra barriers had been installed to prevent the full width being used because it was judged not capable of supporting the weight of being filled with people by modern standards. On the other hand, sometimes it all goes wrong: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Tom Scott, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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