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On July
17, 1981, the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, held a videotaped
tea-dance party in their atrium lobby. With many party-goers standing and
dancing on the suspended walkways, connections supporting the ceiling rods
that held up the second and fourth-floor walkways across the atrium failed,
and both walkways collapsed onto the crowded first-floor atrium below. The
fourth-floor walkway collapsed onto the second-floor walkway, while the
offset third-floor walkway remained intact. As the United States' most
devastating structural failure, in terms of loss of life and injuries, the
Kansas City Hyatt Regency walkways collapse left 114 dead and in excess of
200 injured. In addition, millions of dollars in costs resulted from the
collapse, and thousands of lives were adversely affected.
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