Kansas Hyatt Regency

I was recently refreshing myself on the details of the Kansas Hyatt Regency walkway collapse (Widely taught as part of engineering curriculum / ethics) to see if it was a good example of the recently mentioned Chesterton’s Fence. I learned some new facts I didn’t realize before:

1 - Although the sky bridges were not built-as-designed, even the “correct” design “supported only 60% of the minimum load required by Kansas City building
codes.” ‼️
2 - The hotel still stands today although the sky bridges (including the second-floor bridge that was not part of the collapse) were removed. There is now only a single bridge at floor 2, supported from beneath.
3 - The 40th anniversary of the tragedy was July of 2021. The Kansas City Star has a good retrospective published at that time. This anniversary and these articles were published as the recovery effort at the Surfside condo collapse in Florida was still underway. Structural failures of this magnitude are, fortunately, very rare. 

(In the end I decided that since the original design was also potentially defective and may have been subject to failure for different reasons, not a good example of a Chesterton’s Fence).