On July 17, 1981, two overhead walkways in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri collapsed, killing 114 people and injuring 216.

The hotel had been built just a few years before, during a nationwide pattern of fast-tracked large construction with reduced oversight and major failures.

Its roof had partially collapsed during construction, and the ill-conceived skywalk design progressively degraded due to a miscommunication loop of corporate neglect and irresponsibility.

The Kansas City Star described the national climate of the late 1970s as "high unemployment, inflation and double-digit interest rates [that added] pressure on builders to win contracts and complete projects swiftly".

[9] The rescue operation lasted 14 hours,[8] directed by Kansas City emergency medical director Joseph Waeckerle.

[10] Survivors were buried beneath the walkways' many tons of steel, concrete and glass, which the fire department's jacks could not move.

Volunteers responded to an appeal and brought jacks, flashlights, compressors, jackhammers, concrete saws and generators from construction companies and suppliers.

[12][17] Water from the hotel's ruptured sprinkler system flooded the lobby and put trapped survivors at risk of drowning.

The final rescued victim, Mark Williams, spent more than nine hours pinned underneath the lower skywalk with both legs dislocated and having nearly drowned before the water was shut off.

[16] Within days, a laboratory at Lehigh University began testing box beams on behalf of the steel fabrication source.

[16] Edward Pfrang, lead investigator for the National Bureau of Standards, characterized the neglectful corporate culture surrounding the entire Hyatt construction project as "everyone wanting to walk away from responsibility".

[3] The NBS's final report cited structural overload resulting from design flaws where "the walkways had only minimal capacity to resist their own weight".

Gillum and Associates failed to review the initial design thoroughly, and engineer Daniel M. Duncan accepted Havens Steel's proposed plan via a phone call without performing necessary calculations or viewing sketches that would have revealed its serious intrinsic flaws—in particular, doubling the load on the fourth-floor beams.

[21] Reports and court testimony cited a feedback loop of architects' unverified assumptions, each having believed that someone else had performed calculations and checked reinforcements but without any actual root in documentation or review channels.

Onsite workers had neglected to report noticing beams bending,[3] and instead rerouted their heavy wheelbarrows around the unsteady walkways.

[8] A class-action lawsuit seeking punitive damages was won against Crown Center Corporation, a subsidiary of Hallmark Cards.

The owner of the Kansas City Star Company guessed that the huge victim count ensured that "virtually half the town was affected directly or indirectly by the horror of the tragedy".

[17] The world responded to the Hyatt disaster by upgrading the culture and academic curriculum of engineering ethics and emergency management.

The Kansas City Codes Administration became its own department, doubling its staff and dedicating a single engineer comprehensively to all aspects of each reviewed building.

Claiming full responsibility and disturbed by his memories "365 days a year", he said he wanted "to scare the daylights out of them" in the hope of preventing future mistakes.