Walkways: Tragedy and Transformation in Kansas City

Nearly twenty years ago an elegant Kansas City hotel was the site of one of the most famous engineering failures in recent history. The collapse of two elevated walkways in the lobby left 114 people dead and nearly 200 injured, and plunged the engineering profession into a dilemma over how to deal with the engineers who were involved. In the mid-1970s, as the Kansas City Hyatt Regency was under construction, the engineering profession's codes of ethics were under construction as well. ASCE leaders argued that their society's new code should reflect a new hierarchy of engineers' responsibilities. "Public welfare," they agreed, should be the "primary concern" of engineers, according to the new code. Second should come the engineer's duty to his "clients, employer or employees," and third should be an engineer's loyalty to his profession, thus turning the earlier code on its head. The implications of the new ethics code became disturbingly clear with the Hyatt. This paper tells the story of how the engineering profession struggled to transform an unspeakable disaster into a powerful, if painful, lesson about the meaning of ethics in engineering.