September 14, 2023 • 40 mins
In 1981 America suffered the worst accidental structural collapse in its history. Listen in today to the tragic story of the fast-tracked building disaster that stills haunts Kansas City.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
So I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just the
two of us and we're gonna do just fine.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I have a good feeling because this is stuff you
should know. We've been at it for decades now.
Speaker 4 (00:25):
Not decades, well, in different decades.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Right, that's how people get you. Yeah, they say stuff
like that.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
That's right, Big CoA for this one. It is about
a very gruesome tragedy that we're gonna detail, and we're
gonna talk about a little bit of the gruesome stuff,
but not get to you know, detailed, because it was
a terrible tragedy. But we just want to alert listeners,
especially our younger listeners, that some of this stuff is
(00:55):
pretty terrible. That is the events of the High Regency
Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri in nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Yeah, and that was just one year after that hotel opened.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
Right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
This is the High Regency, a forty five story, seven
hundred room hotel that opened in July of nineteen eighty
It was a part of a big suite a complex
called the Crown Center. Huh Yeah, the Crown Center complex,
and it had retail, had housing, all kinds of stuff
owned by the Hallmark Corporation.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
That's where the Crown came from. Because remember if you
turn a Hallmark card over sometimes it says Crown.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
Well then their logo is a Crown.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Oh yeah, that too. But this hotel, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
If you go back and look at pictures of it
pre disaster, it was magnificent. Like if you looked up,
you would see that there was a high hall a
walkway right over your head. And that was actually one
of three that were kind of like the signature design
of this atrium at the High Regions see Kansas City.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
And like we said, this thing had been open for
about a year when the collapse tragedy occurred. During one
of their they were hosting these weekend tea dances, which
apparently were very popular in town. It was sort of
an antiquated old school thing that they did, but the
people of Kansas City ate it up and they were
just growing bigger and bigger with every weekend. And on
(02:25):
this particular weekend they had, you know, as they did,
they had a live band playing, and I saw anywhere
from I saw a thousand people in different places. This
is one of those things where like every time you
see a different video, you'll get different numbers and different things,
and these can be a little frustrating sometimes. But at
(02:48):
least a thousand, yeah, and maybe as many as two
thousand people there hanging out, partying and dancing in the lobby.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
I mean, if you see there's footage of it, because
I think one of the local TV stations was doing
a human interest piece on how popular these this dance
had becomes Friday night dance, and that place was packed
with people, not just in the atrium on the floor,
but also up at the terrace restaurant and on those
three walkways that span the entire length of the atrium
(03:18):
from one side to another on the second, third, and
fourth floors. So there was a ton of people. And
the number I most commonly saw was fifteen hundred, so
I guess everybody else split the difference.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Yeah, so it's crowded, it's packed full of people. A
little after seven o'clock, the band comes back from a
break to play their final big number of the dance contest.
And you know, when you look at interviews with people
from the time, they all describe hearing three loud popping
(03:50):
noises or snapping noises. They sounded like, you know, some
people said they sounded like gunshots going off.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
In very quick success.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Floors the walkways of on floors four and two collapsed
fully these cement and we're going to go over you
know why this happened and what these are all were
made of, but you know, steel and concrete, and it
was super heavy and collapsed on hundreds and hundreds of
people below.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Yes, so these each one I think, weighed something like
thirty two tons, each of these walkways did, and one
was above the number. The fourth story walkway was directly
above the second story walkway, so much so that the
second story walkway was dangling from the fourth story walkway.
So in the fourth story walkway gave it came down,
(04:38):
the second story hit the ground first, the fourth story
walkway hit the second floor. So there was like a
stratum or a strata of layers of destruction of debris
and people were pin chuck beneath two thirty two ton
walkways that were in four segments. So each segment wasn't
thirty two tons, but it was enough to really do
(05:00):
a lot of damage, like immediately, like apparently it happened
in the blink of an eye basically, and I mean,
like it's really tough to get across, like how much
of a tragedy this was. Like there were couples dancing
that were killed simultaneously by this stuff, So that means
that there were people in Kansas City who lost both
parents all at once, or lost one parent, or lost
(05:23):
a friend. Like a lot of people were impacted by
this tragedy and it just happened in just the blink
of an eye.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Yeah, I mean it ripped from the ceiling and they
just collapsed. The eyewitness accounts if you see any of
the either contemporaneous footage or they've done interviews with people
since and like follow up documentaries and such, it's just awful.
Everyone talked about how in like the some people set
(05:51):
up to like five seconds afterward, it was just complete silence,
like obviously the every the band had stopped and there
was just a brief moment of nothingness and then all
of a sudden screaming, wailing people in some of the
most horrible pain and circumstances that you can imagine, which
(06:14):
again we're going to get to a little bit, But
it's if you really want to dive into the down
the rabbit hole of what all happened to these folks,
you can you can look this stuff up online.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Yeah, there's there's actually a lot of really well written
articles on it from out of Kansas City.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
But the the in.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
That chaos that ensued almost immediately, there were a lot
of people pinned underneath. There were people who've been injured
by debris, and then there were other people who were
nearby and were just dazed and weren't really injured at all,
but just couldn't believe what they'd just seen. And then
there was a small kind of cadre people among the
(06:55):
witnesses who just kind of immediately sprang into action. And
we you see footage of the immedia affrom at. You
see men in suits and women in dresses like trying
to pick through the debris and get people out of
there as fast as they can. And all of this
just started even before the fire department and police department
showed up to start to take charge of things. People
(07:15):
just immediately some people had an impulse to go in
there and help.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Yeah, it was and you know, we should mention that
the fire Department of the Cops. Everyone got there really
really fast. Yeah, apparently they were also close to hospitals.
I think there were three, it was called Hospital Hill,
three hospitals that were really nearby that started taking people on.
They were working, you know, basically into the night and
(07:42):
into the next morning, with a final death toll of
one hundred and fourteen people perished and more than two
hundred were injured. And I think they still listed as
an American history, at least the largest structural disaster in history.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
That it was until September eleventh, the largest in American history,
and then it became the largest accidental structural disaster in
American history. So, yeah, one hundred and fourteen people dead,
one hundred and eleven like basically dead on the scene.
Three more people who were gravely injured died later on
(08:21):
from their injuries. And the people who survived there were
incredibly survivors who were pinned under these walkways as slabs
of concrete, but they were in terrible shape. And there
was a man named Mark Williams who was a survivor,
and he's if you read about this or watch videos
on it, he's very prominent. He's a very outspoken type
(08:43):
of guy, and he talked a lot about being rescued.
He was the last person rescued all the way at
four thirty am, but he was at the bar that
was directly beneath the walkways and realized what was happening
and started to run. Those walkways fell so fast that
apparently he didn't even get his first stride, but his
(09:05):
legs were astride and so he was smushed down into
a split and that's where he stayed until four thirty am.
And this happened at like seven pm, and he survived.
He managed to live. And there were other stories like
that too, a little eleven year old boy who was
pulled out of the rubble. A few people I think
(09:25):
six or seven or something like that were did manage
to survive, but the vast majority of people who were
on or under the walkways when they collapsed died.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
Yeah, there was.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
There were situations where they had to amputate arms and
legs on the spot just to get people out of
there and give them a chance at living, and they
did this kind of thing with chainsaws. There was one
and this is really gruesome, but there was one horrific
story of a guy that was, you know, trying to
(10:00):
pull someone out and the guy's arm just comes off
and he's holding it, and the officer on charge said,
the guy just set it down and left. And you know,
we'll get to the PTSD that obviously followed, but a
lot of these first responders, you know, there were some
suicides later on. There was alcoholism and drug use and
(10:24):
lives and shambles because they didn't have stuff, like you know,
they went to work the next day. They weren't like,
all right, we need to get you into counseling quick
like and start taking care of you. And that's one
of the big changes that came out of this was
PTSD therapy for emergency responders.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Yeah, and it had an impact on the entire city.
I mean, people who weren't there, people who didn't even
know people who were there, were still impacted for years
and years. It just had it just left a blotch
on the city. It was just such a horrible tragedy.
And there are a couple of other stories that stuck
out to me of the people who died. One that
(11:00):
did was a woman named Lynn Vander Hayden who's twenty two,
and she would just happen to be walking through the
lobby on her way to the Revolving restaurant on the
top of the hotel. She was just passing through and
she died. And then another one that stood out as
a man named Oscar Grimm, who pushed his wife Joan
(11:22):
out of the way and she lived and he died.
But he managed to act that quickly that he was
able to save his wife's life. His last act on
earth was to save his wife's life, which I think
is remarkable.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah, that's amazing. So they turn the you know, it
basically becomes a war zone. Immediately, they turn one room
into a triage center. They turned one room into a
temporary morgue. They're trying to get people out of there
and into the parking lot. It is summertime, so was
still daylight during the initial efforts, but as darkness fell,
(12:03):
the power had been blown. So then it becomes dark
overnight when they're still you know, sort of digging through there,
either trying to get dead bodies out or trying to
get people out that are still just wailing in the darkness.
And not only that, but the sprinkler system had torn
apart and a water pipe burst and for about fifty
(12:25):
minutes this. You know, parts of this room were filling
up with water, and you know, let's say you're trapped
in a very small, confined space is filling up with water.
There were survivors that said they thought they were going
to drown all of a sudden.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
I didn't see that anyone definitively did drown, but the
people on the bottom of the pile were definitely in
danger of it for sure. It took forty five minutes,
I think, to finally turn the water off forty eight
forty eight and then but there was a quick thinking
fire chief. I don't know if it was a deputy
chief I saw. I didn't get their name, and there
were a bunch of deputy chiefs there, but they were like,
(13:02):
we need to bulldoze these front doors because they're acting
as a damn. So they bulldozed the doors and let
the water out and kind of saved the day. But
that was I mean, imagine being pinned beneath this rubble
and now you might accidentally drown.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Like what a day.
Speaker 4 (13:17):
Yeah, it was. It was a tragedy that still looms large.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
And maybe we should take a break and talk about
what happened and why this happened right after this.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
So, Chuck, there were so many people and very fortunately,
like you said, they were near a few hospitals, but
they ended up requiring seventeen emergency rooms for this.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
They construction companies came in and were donating forklifts, they
were donating cranes, people were donating their own personal equipment.
Everybody basically came and chipped in. You mentioned those front
doors being knocked down. They ended up knocking holes through
the entire front of the hotel, not holes like there
(14:26):
was no front of the hotel because they had to
get a crane in there eventually. Because all the equipment
that they were trying to get forklifts, I mean, you
name it, to try and lift these concrete slabs, it
was just pushing everything out of the way. So they
ended up having to bring in, like, you know, the
most heavy duty construction crane you can imagine to pull
these things up eventually.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
So I saw, Chuck that like there were all these
amazing acts of people of generosity, of heroism, and just
people coming together. And I also saw from some of
the people who were involved that within our of the tragedy,
the mood did like a one to eighty, and people
started to want to know what happened, what had gone wrong,
(15:09):
and who was to blame, because it was very clearly
something had gone terribly wrong with the structure of those skywalks,
and people wanted to know why because again, this was
just such a catastrophic loss of life it was almost incomprehensible.
But it started to settle in that it had happened
and that somebody somewhere was to blame and people wanted
(15:29):
to know.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
So what they eventually figured out, and this was after
some pretty amazing investigation by the National Bureau of Standards
which is now the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
They were I mean they did they X rayed material,
they did metallurgical examinations of steel, they did, you know,
(15:53):
physics tests, They did everything you could imagine to figure
out what went wrong and what they landed on. It
turns out they didn't really need to do any of
those tests. It was a design change that was, as
it turns out, basically rubber stamped. The original design of
these walkways that were again two and four were suspended
(16:15):
above each other, and floor number three, which didn't collapse,
was just offset from that one kind of over the
center of the atrium. But the original design called for
these skywalks to be held together with one, you know,
group of continuous steel rods that went through both floors,
and all the sets of these hollow beams threaded with nuts.
(16:37):
But this was like, you know, forty five feet or
so of threaded rod. And they said, you know what,
threading wears out, and if you thread a nut forty
five feet, that's a long way, and eventually by the
time you get to where you want to go that
things are not going to be as strong as it
needs to be. So they changed the design to basically
hang the second floor from the first the fourth floor
(17:00):
using two sets of rods instead of one continuous set,
which basically double the weight of what everything was hanging
on on floor four. There's a great YouTube video. I
believe the guy is English. His name is Tom Scott,
but he got an engineer, this guy named Grady from
Practical Engineers, who put it like this. Imagine a long
(17:24):
rope that two friends are hanging on. One person's hanging
above the other. That's fine. Then imagine that same rope
with the same two people hanging but in this case,
the second person is hanging from the other person's ankles,
so the total weight is the same, but the stress
on that first person or in this case, that first
(17:45):
top fourth floor is different.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
I saw a guy named Bill Quip Klapman who said
flagpole instead of rope. So I think that kind of
demonstrates Chuck that because it's such an easy analogy that
you could have looked at these designs and I mean
you specifically and me and been like, are you sure
this is the same as what you guys originally had,
(18:08):
Like as far as the math goes, it was, I
wouldn't have So it was so radically different, But at
the same time, it seemed like, yeah, it's a no brainer.
Of course that's what you're gonna do, because not only
are those could those threads wear out? Like how you're
gonna have to put the entire skywalk on each of
(18:30):
those six threads, those six hanging rods threaded hanging rods,
Like you're gonna have to slide them down, and of
course you're gonna damage some of those threads and then
they're totally useless. You won't be able to screw those
nuts all the way up to the bottom of the
skywalk any longer. So what you're gonna do? You just
cut it in half. It makes total sense. It's still
(18:50):
the same general design. The two skywalks are hanging from
the ceiling, but like you said, now, the second floor
skywalk is hanging from the fourth floor skywalk. That was
a catastrophic mistake because the skywalks themselves were in no way,
shape or form designed to hold up their own weight,
(19:10):
and they were attached on either end to basically portals
that led to the hallways that continued on the fourth,
second and third floor on either side. Those connections to
those portals were in no way, shape or form designed
to hold the walkway up. So I think I said.
They spanned the entire length of the atrium, which is
one hundred and twenty feet, So these were one hundred
(19:32):
and twenty feet long skywalks, and they had brass handrails
at waist high, and then between that and the skywalk
was class It was super cool looking, super late seventies
early eighties design.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
They were attached to the end hallways on either side,
so they were basically like the hallways were just suddenly
stripped of everything around them except for the part you
walked on, and that's what crossed to the tre It's
pretty cool. And they were attached to the hallways that
continued on either side through portals, and the actual span
(20:10):
itself was held aloft by three box beams that were
perpendicular to the length of the walkways themselves. Right, So
you had basically it looked like a kid swing, but
three of them, and then you had the walkway spanning
those three things. Does that make sense?
Speaker 4 (20:29):
I think so.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
So the walkway was held up by those three box
beams that were held aloft each by two hanging rods,
and it just it just couldn't do it. What's surprising
to me is that it lasted a full year after
it opened.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
You know, yeah, I mean, I guess we could go
over the load bearing here. That seems to be a
pretty good place for it. The NBS, like I said,
he was doing the investigating. They you know, they did testing.
They built their own version of this stuff, and they
went and found that the load bearing capacity for just
(21:09):
one individual connection was eighty one killo newtons, which I've
never heard of before.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
To clear things up, chuck, a kill a newton is
equal to one kilogram meter per second squared, So I'm.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Sure that clears it up for everybody. Right, And that's
just the you know, that's called the dead low. That's
the way to the structure itself. If you have people
on it, obviously it's going to be a lot different.
And there were a lot of people on this. They
were up there having a good time and dancing and partying.
They said that would add another eleven killo newtons, So
(21:45):
eventually you get to a total you know, by the
time it collapsed, a total weight of ninety five killer newtons,
which was fourteen more than it was even supposed to
hold to begin with.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Right, that's just like, that's how it was in reality.
The thing that makes it even worse to me is
that that doesn't meet code at all. Like code is
that you would have to basically double that amount of
load bearing capacity to have passed inspection. And yet these
things passed inspection.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
Oh at the time it was double yes.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
Yeah, yeah, that wasn't a change. Like this thing passed
inspection despite the code requiring it to be able to
support one hundred and eighty one killer newtons. Like you said,
they were able to support eighty one killer newtons. So
it was a terrible design. And the only explanation was
that the actual explanation that when they changed that design
(22:42):
from the singular rods, which is two guys hanging separately
on a fire pole or a rope rather than hanging
on their ankles, when they changed it, no one did
the calculations to see if it would hold up. And
that is exactly what happened.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
Yeah, they you know, they did.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Of course, something like this happens, you're gonna inspect, like
the welding, you're gonna inspect the steel.
Speaker 4 (23:05):
I know.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
They subpoened the actual steel manufacturer and the welding company
and the GC and like basically everybody involved. And what
they found was this thing basically like the welds would
eventually rip. They had these two sort of sea bracket
beams that they welded together to form one hollow, squared beam,
(23:28):
and the rods ran through the middle of these and
those did split, and the bolts basically pulled. You can
see pictures where it just pulled right up through the
center of them. But they said that this would have
happened anyway even if it was like a solid steel
beam and not too welded together.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
It wasn't because the welds.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
It wasn't because of anything basically other than the fact
that this design change made it almost inevitable.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
So this design change was done by the steel fabricator
on what are called shop drawings, and shop drawings are
basically like a close up explanation of exactly how you're
supposed to manufacture what the engineer or the architect wants right,
And the steel fabricator says that they called the architect
(24:12):
in charge, a guy named Daniel Duncan, and got his
approval over the phone to change the rods from one
single rod to two rods split in half.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
And that was it.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
There was no no one on the steel fabricator side
did the calculations, and yet they stamped their approval on it.
Dan Duncan didn't do the calculations, and yet he stamped
his approval on it. And then a guy named Jack Gillham,
who was the art of the engineer of record who
Dan Duncan worked for and was in charge of this project,
(24:46):
he didn't do the calculations and he stamped a steal
of approval on that change as well. So it made
it through. It made it through the process. That it's
supposed to go through. And when you're sitting there building this,
or when you're sitting there putting all this together and
you're looking at this and it's got all three stamps
that it's supposed to have, you're pretty sure that it's
the way it's supposed to be. People don't stop and
(25:08):
question that kind of thing, or at least they didn't
during this construction phase.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
I think that's so important to remember, because I think
people stop all the time and say things aren't safe
and that we should revisit stuff. Yeah, but they didn't
hear there was even apparently, you know, in interviews after
the fact, there were crew from the build site that
we're saying like they saw these beams sort of stressing
and bending a little bit when they were putting this
(25:34):
thing together. There was a collapse earlier, a huge section
of the roof collapse on this building in the middle
of the night while they were building it. So this
was a project that already had sort of one near
tragedy averted on its hands, and it was just sort
of pushed through and no one spoke up. And of
(25:56):
course I'm not blaming the builder who saw the steel,
but like, you know, everyone should be able to stand
up and say and not just assume that someone else
knows what they're doing when it comes to a project
like this.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Yeah, I think that's essential, and I think that this
disaster actually kind of helped change that too. That was
one of the things that did change. So I'd say, Chuck,
we take a break and come back and talk about
some of the fallout from this.
Speaker 4 (26:23):
All right, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
So before we broke, you mentioned a guy named Jack Gillham,
who was the engineer in charge of the project.
Speaker 4 (26:56):
Gillham would go on to be a public speaker.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
He later went on to say, you know that the
problem this is a quote was so obvious that a
first year engineering student could have figured it out too.
Speaker 4 (27:10):
Little, too late.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Obviously, there was a tribunal form by the Missouri Board
of Professional Engineers in nineteen eighty four in the years
following that ruled it they were grossly negligent. The phone
approval was obviously grossly negligent, and there was quote a
conscious indifference to professional duty.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
So how does that happen?
Speaker 1 (27:35):
It was a time where there was a lot of
production and construction being rushed through, not just there but
all over the place the late seventies in the early eighties,
it just seems like there were a lot of fast
track projects. There wasn't as much oversight, there weren't as
many rules in place, and there was a lot of
(27:56):
stuff ed. Who helped us out with this pointed out
the Kemper Arena roof collapse in seventy nine. The Hartford
Civic Center had another collapse in the year before in
seventy eight. The chat Plain Towers in Miami that collapsed
in twenty twenty one, they were built in that time,
in the late seventies and early eighties, So it just
seems like it was a time where you know, people
(28:19):
were probably just rushing around trying to make money. Greed
is always a factor, I think in stuff like this
and just trying to build bill build.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
So yeah, but.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Yeah, and there were it was a cascading chain of
failures to not pass the buck, to actually stop and
look at things. But you can really lay at the
most at Duncan and Gilliam's feet, and that tribunal that
Gillam went through found, like you said, that he was
grossly negligent, But the way that they proved his negligence
(28:50):
was that his firm had a policy that the engineer
of record on any project had to verify all plans
and all changes them before stamping.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
It with approval.
Speaker 3 (29:03):
And the fact that he had failed to meet his
own requirements, that tribunal said, that's proof positive that you
were negligent in this. And then they also said, apparently
he had a lot of pushback that he was giving.
He would not accept responsibility. He deflected it at every turn,
and it was so his attitude about it was so cavalier.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
They said that.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
They cited it as an additional breach of professional obligations.
It was that bad that, like his refusal accept responsibility,
was yet another piece of negligence that happened after the fact.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
Yeah, and you know, if all this stuff sounds criminal,
none of it rose to any kind of criminal proceeding.
Speaker 4 (29:51):
It was a civil legal quagmire.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Like we said, it was owned by Hallmark Cards, this
building and the ones around and there were one hundred
and thirty plus lawsuits. They didn't all get together and
kind of go after them together, which you know sometimes
can happen.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
They were fragmented.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Some people went at it alone, some people got together
with you know a few other people. And there were
one hundred and thirty suits plus total, seeking more than
three billion dollars in damages. The hotel costs fifty million
dollars to build to begin with, like the entire operation,
And depending on the cases, they always settled, sometimes kind
(30:34):
of right up until they were supposed to go to trial.
But they did settle all of them in various ways.
There was a woman named Winfred Witscher who got five
hundred dollars because her face got cut. There was a
widow and four kids of Henry Botnan who got six
hundred thousand dollars. Different federal courts would come in or
(30:57):
different judges would come in and basically say all right,
let's let's get together on a large settlement when it
ended up being one thousand dollars to basically anybody who
could prove they were there period, like whether or not
they were injured. If you could prove you were there,
you would get a thousand bucks.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Yeah, and I guess waive any right to sue after
that point. Well, sure, But they ended up paying out
something like one hundred and forty million dollars. Most of
it came from Hallmark.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
Yeah, I saw one fifty well, and that's.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
In early eighties dollars, I believe, right.
Speaker 4 (31:29):
Yeah, I mean not close to the three bill.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
No, no, no, for sure.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
But they Hallmark ended up paying out, mostly because they
were the ultimate owner of that hotel, and from what
I saw, they were. There was a guy who was
suing Hallmark, but Hallmark settled, and the lawyer had done
all this extensive research and discovery and it basically found
that Hallmark was really more culpable than anyone thought, and
(31:57):
Hallmark's Hallmark settled. The thing never got published, but I
got the impression that's why Hallmark ended up spending the
most money out of anybody to settle these claims.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
And the.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
Whole experience just tore the town apart because there were
people who wanted to get to the truth and wanted,
you know, retribution, and apparently the business community really wanted
to kind of sweep it under the rug for a
lot of different reasons. But I think a lot of
the boosters were like, this is a black eye on
the city. I saw it described as and the Kansas
City Star and the Kansas City Times said no, no, no,
(32:35):
we're going to report on this. Even in the face
of community pushback, I guess, and they won pulisers for
their reporting for local reporting because they got to the
bottom of what actually happened.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Yeah, there was a guy, like you said, there was
a news crew on the scene anyway for the tea dance,
and this cameraman was filming a lot of the aftermath,
and he had people there that were victims that were
coming up trying to like rip his camera away and
start a fight with the guy, saying he shouldn't be
shooting that stuff. But people came to his defense in
(33:11):
the moment. What I don't get is how I mean,
I know Hallmark ultimately will pay because they were the
parent company, But how did someone say they were more
culpable than when it's really obvious that it was a
design change that was rubber stamped by this design firm, Like,
what did Hallmark? It's not like they ran that up
(33:32):
the greeting card chain and they said, yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
This is the impression I have that the whole thing
was fast and loose and cutting corners was in part
because Hallmark or the subsidiary Hallmark owned the hotel, was
cheaping out and one of the one piece of evidence
I saw that kind of puts that together was from Gillham,
who one of his defenses was I asked for on
(33:59):
site in spaces, at the metal fabricators, at the job site, everywhere,
and Hallmark wouldn't shell out the extra money to make
that happen. Had there been an inspector on site, then
this would have never happened kind of thing. So I
think one of the reasons why the business community wanted
to sweep it on the rug is Hallmark is the
(34:19):
It was, at least at the time, the far and
away the largest employer in Kansas City, very much beloved.
A lot of people owed their livelihood to Hallmark, Their
kids went to college because of Hallmark. It was a
really well regarded company. And apparently that that was that
facade or whatever, that image was attacked by the Times
(34:42):
in the Star. And that was one reason why some
people were so against that reporting, because even if you
didn't have anything to hide, but you still had an
affinity for Hallmark because they were your employer, you might
be upset at the news for reporting that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Even sure, a lot of the many millions of dollars
were ear Mark for charities that Hallmark donated to as
part of.
Speaker 4 (35:03):
These plea deals.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Hyatt actually sued for four million dollars, but not Hallmark.
They sued the design firm. They sued twelve different parties,
including the design firm, the GC, the steel manufacturer that
I could not find out what happened with those lawsuits,
which was really frustrating.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
But there were lawsuits all over the place.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Yeah, it was a mess. And as you would expect,
and like I said to this, the shadow hung over
the entire city for a decade. Apparently it came in
a really terrible time because the city had just gone
through a burst of prosperity, I think, and this hotel
was kind of a symbol of that, and so it
kind of really shook the foundations of this kind of
exuberant Kansas City. Like you know how like when you're
(35:48):
the more excited you are, the more happy you are,
the harder you fall when something comes along and just
completely undermines that. I get the impression that that was
kind of what up into Kansas City. It took a
long time for it to recover. It wasn't until two
thousand and eight that they even managed to erect a
memorial because Apparently there's so many people who didn't want
(36:09):
to think about it or talk about it or memorialize it.
But somebody, some of the survivor's family or some of
the victims' families got together and created a memorial at
a park just a block or so away, and Hallmark
kicked in twenty five thousand dollars.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
That's right to build the memorial itself.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
It is still there, the higher regency is and those
that atream is still there, and the walkway on the
second floor is still there. Of course, it's not held
up by it's not suspended. It is held from underneath
by columns and obvious And you know, I mentioned the
PTSD for first responders. That was a big push after this,
and then also just you know, a general tightening up
(36:55):
of and this wasn't just in Kansas City, this was
an international incident. So it really shook up the industry
as far as how fast and loose things were going overall.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
Yeah, I know the asse. The American Society of Civil
Engineers came out and said, unambiguously, if you're the engineer
of record, you have to verify every single change or
you are completely responsible for anything that happens as a
result of that. It's on you, like, just want to
make sure we're clear about that. And that was that
(37:28):
was a change that came directly from that and from
Gillham himself.
Speaker 4 (37:31):
Well, the buck has to stop with somebody.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
It was a situation where everybody was finger pointing and
when when you can point to a single decision that
that caused this and not like well it was sort
of this and this and this right like that these
things had had they not even had that tea dance,
eventually they would have collapsed.
Speaker 4 (37:53):
They just weren't built correctly.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Yeah, it's uh, it's nuts.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
I saw that even the original design wouldn't have met
code for holding up people, wouldn't have reached those killing
newtons that it needed.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
You got anything else, No, I got nothing else. Big
shout out to the people of Kansas City. I hope
to do a show there one day. We did go
to Lawrence, Kansas and Saint Louis in the general area,
but we have not hit Kansas City yet.
Speaker 4 (38:22):
So we'll do that one day.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
Yes, one day we will for sure. And since Chuck
just promised Kansas City we're going to come to a show.
Of course, he unlocked listener mail.
Speaker 4 (38:34):
I'm gonna call this just something a little lighter.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
I think we could use it, yeah, because we inadvertently well,
I'll just read it. Hey, guys, been listening to the
show for about six years. My first time writing in
to highlight an ongoing mistake that is nonetheless hilarious and
I assume completely unintentional. During the twenty two Halloween episode,
Josh voice one of the great characters in English literature,
(38:59):
Megal in the toll House. But in subsequent episodes, when
you guys, namely Chuck, tries to get Josh to do
the voice, he refers to him as Smiegel. Spiegel, of course,
is the hobbit from the Lord of the Rings who's
corrupted by the One Ring and eventually transformed into Gollum.
After hearing this, I went back and red listened to
the twenty twenty two Halloween episode again, and I can
(39:20):
sure I can assure you that the toll House is
even better second time around. First, and now I can
just imagine a mixture of Josh and Andy serkis narrating
the dialogue of Smiegele Gollum as the Meagle character in question.
I almost didn't want to write in because of this
to make you aware of.
Speaker 4 (39:35):
This hilarious error.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Though I assume someone will eventually beat me to it,
but not true. Josh Bills Borrow, you were the first
to write in. We did get a couple of people
that wrote in after you though that Yeah, he were first,
Ease and Josh is from Madison, Connecticut.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Way to go, Josh, thanks for that.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
Thanks to everybody who wrote in to say the same thing,
because it is pretty hilarious.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Maybe that's why I'm if I Migle's been off.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
I've been accidentally doing sgle proughly. So well, we'll get
to the bottom of that, everybody. I promise Megel will
be back someday.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Someday.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
Uh And if you want to get in touch of this,
like Josh at all did, you can send us an
email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
You Know, Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
So I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just the
two of us and we're gonna do just fine.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I have a good feeling because this is stuff you
should know. We've been at it for decades now.
Speaker 4 (00:25):
Not decades, well, in different decades.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Right, that's how people get you. Yeah, they say stuff
like that.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
That's right, Big CoA for this one. It is about
a very gruesome tragedy that we're gonna detail, and we're
gonna talk about a little bit of the gruesome stuff,
but not get to you know, detailed, because it was
a terrible tragedy. But we just want to alert listeners,
especially our younger listeners, that some of this stuff is
(00:55):
pretty terrible. That is the events of the High Regency
Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri in nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Yeah, and that was just one year after that hotel opened.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
Right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
This is the High Regency, a forty five story, seven
hundred room hotel that opened in July of nineteen eighty
It was a part of a big suite a complex
called the Crown Center. Huh Yeah, the Crown Center complex,
and it had retail, had housing, all kinds of stuff
owned by the Hallmark Corporation.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
That's where the Crown came from. Because remember if you
turn a Hallmark card over sometimes it says Crown.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
Well then their logo is a Crown.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Oh yeah, that too. But this hotel, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
If you go back and look at pictures of it
pre disaster, it was magnificent. Like if you looked up,
you would see that there was a high hall a
walkway right over your head. And that was actually one
of three that were kind of like the signature design
of this atrium at the High Regions see Kansas City.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
And like we said, this thing had been open for
about a year when the collapse tragedy occurred. During one
of their they were hosting these weekend tea dances, which
apparently were very popular in town. It was sort of
an antiquated old school thing that they did, but the
people of Kansas City ate it up and they were
just growing bigger and bigger with every weekend. And on
(02:25):
this particular weekend they had, you know, as they did,
they had a live band playing, and I saw anywhere
from I saw a thousand people in different places. This
is one of those things where like every time you
see a different video, you'll get different numbers and different things,
and these can be a little frustrating sometimes. But at
(02:48):
least a thousand, yeah, and maybe as many as two
thousand people there hanging out, partying and dancing in the lobby.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
I mean, if you see there's footage of it, because
I think one of the local TV stations was doing
a human interest piece on how popular these this dance
had becomes Friday night dance, and that place was packed
with people, not just in the atrium on the floor,
but also up at the terrace restaurant and on those
three walkways that span the entire length of the atrium
(03:18):
from one side to another on the second, third, and
fourth floors. So there was a ton of people. And
the number I most commonly saw was fifteen hundred, so
I guess everybody else split the difference.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Yeah, so it's crowded, it's packed full of people. A
little after seven o'clock, the band comes back from a
break to play their final big number of the dance contest.
And you know, when you look at interviews with people
from the time, they all describe hearing three loud popping
(03:50):
noises or snapping noises. They sounded like, you know, some
people said they sounded like gunshots going off.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
In very quick success.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Floors the walkways of on floors four and two collapsed
fully these cement and we're going to go over you
know why this happened and what these are all were
made of, but you know, steel and concrete, and it
was super heavy and collapsed on hundreds and hundreds of
people below.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Yes, so these each one I think, weighed something like
thirty two tons, each of these walkways did, and one
was above the number. The fourth story walkway was directly
above the second story walkway, so much so that the
second story walkway was dangling from the fourth story walkway.
So in the fourth story walkway gave it came down,
(04:38):
the second story hit the ground first, the fourth story
walkway hit the second floor. So there was like a
stratum or a strata of layers of destruction of debris
and people were pin chuck beneath two thirty two ton
walkways that were in four segments. So each segment wasn't
thirty two tons, but it was enough to really do
(05:00):
a lot of damage, like immediately, like apparently it happened
in the blink of an eye basically, and I mean,
like it's really tough to get across, like how much
of a tragedy this was. Like there were couples dancing
that were killed simultaneously by this stuff, So that means
that there were people in Kansas City who lost both
parents all at once, or lost one parent, or lost
(05:23):
a friend. Like a lot of people were impacted by
this tragedy and it just happened in just the blink
of an eye.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Yeah, I mean it ripped from the ceiling and they
just collapsed. The eyewitness accounts if you see any of
the either contemporaneous footage or they've done interviews with people
since and like follow up documentaries and such, it's just awful.
Everyone talked about how in like the some people set
(05:51):
up to like five seconds afterward, it was just complete silence,
like obviously the every the band had stopped and there
was just a brief moment of nothingness and then all
of a sudden screaming, wailing people in some of the
most horrible pain and circumstances that you can imagine, which
(06:14):
again we're going to get to a little bit, But
it's if you really want to dive into the down
the rabbit hole of what all happened to these folks,
you can you can look this stuff up online.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Yeah, there's there's actually a lot of really well written
articles on it from out of Kansas City.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
But the the in.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
That chaos that ensued almost immediately, there were a lot
of people pinned underneath. There were people who've been injured
by debris, and then there were other people who were
nearby and were just dazed and weren't really injured at all,
but just couldn't believe what they'd just seen. And then
there was a small kind of cadre people among the
(06:55):
witnesses who just kind of immediately sprang into action. And
we you see footage of the immedia affrom at. You
see men in suits and women in dresses like trying
to pick through the debris and get people out of
there as fast as they can. And all of this
just started even before the fire department and police department
showed up to start to take charge of things. People
(07:15):
just immediately some people had an impulse to go in
there and help.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Yeah, it was and you know, we should mention that
the fire Department of the Cops. Everyone got there really
really fast. Yeah, apparently they were also close to hospitals.
I think there were three, it was called Hospital Hill,
three hospitals that were really nearby that started taking people on.
They were working, you know, basically into the night and
(07:42):
into the next morning, with a final death toll of
one hundred and fourteen people perished and more than two
hundred were injured. And I think they still listed as
an American history, at least the largest structural disaster in history.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
That it was until September eleventh, the largest in American history,
and then it became the largest accidental structural disaster in
American history. So, yeah, one hundred and fourteen people dead,
one hundred and eleven like basically dead on the scene.
Three more people who were gravely injured died later on
(08:21):
from their injuries. And the people who survived there were
incredibly survivors who were pinned under these walkways as slabs
of concrete, but they were in terrible shape. And there
was a man named Mark Williams who was a survivor,
and he's if you read about this or watch videos
on it, he's very prominent. He's a very outspoken type
(08:43):
of guy, and he talked a lot about being rescued.
He was the last person rescued all the way at
four thirty am, but he was at the bar that
was directly beneath the walkways and realized what was happening
and started to run. Those walkways fell so fast that
apparently he didn't even get his first stride, but his
(09:05):
legs were astride and so he was smushed down into
a split and that's where he stayed until four thirty am.
And this happened at like seven pm, and he survived.
He managed to live. And there were other stories like
that too, a little eleven year old boy who was
pulled out of the rubble. A few people I think
(09:25):
six or seven or something like that were did manage
to survive, but the vast majority of people who were
on or under the walkways when they collapsed died.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
Yeah, there was.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
There were situations where they had to amputate arms and
legs on the spot just to get people out of
there and give them a chance at living, and they
did this kind of thing with chainsaws. There was one
and this is really gruesome, but there was one horrific
story of a guy that was, you know, trying to
(10:00):
pull someone out and the guy's arm just comes off
and he's holding it, and the officer on charge said,
the guy just set it down and left. And you know,
we'll get to the PTSD that obviously followed, but a
lot of these first responders, you know, there were some
suicides later on. There was alcoholism and drug use and
(10:24):
lives and shambles because they didn't have stuff, like you know,
they went to work the next day. They weren't like,
all right, we need to get you into counseling quick
like and start taking care of you. And that's one
of the big changes that came out of this was
PTSD therapy for emergency responders.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Yeah, and it had an impact on the entire city.
I mean, people who weren't there, people who didn't even
know people who were there, were still impacted for years
and years. It just had it just left a blotch
on the city. It was just such a horrible tragedy.
And there are a couple of other stories that stuck
out to me of the people who died. One that
(11:00):
did was a woman named Lynn Vander Hayden who's twenty two,
and she would just happen to be walking through the
lobby on her way to the Revolving restaurant on the
top of the hotel. She was just passing through and
she died. And then another one that stood out as
a man named Oscar Grimm, who pushed his wife Joan
(11:22):
out of the way and she lived and he died.
But he managed to act that quickly that he was
able to save his wife's life. His last act on
earth was to save his wife's life, which I think
is remarkable.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah, that's amazing. So they turn the you know, it
basically becomes a war zone. Immediately, they turn one room
into a triage center. They turned one room into a
temporary morgue. They're trying to get people out of there
and into the parking lot. It is summertime, so was
still daylight during the initial efforts, but as darkness fell,
(12:03):
the power had been blown. So then it becomes dark
overnight when they're still you know, sort of digging through there,
either trying to get dead bodies out or trying to
get people out that are still just wailing in the darkness.
And not only that, but the sprinkler system had torn
apart and a water pipe burst and for about fifty
(12:25):
minutes this. You know, parts of this room were filling
up with water, and you know, let's say you're trapped
in a very small, confined space is filling up with water.
There were survivors that said they thought they were going
to drown all of a sudden.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
I didn't see that anyone definitively did drown, but the
people on the bottom of the pile were definitely in
danger of it for sure. It took forty five minutes,
I think, to finally turn the water off forty eight
forty eight and then but there was a quick thinking
fire chief. I don't know if it was a deputy
chief I saw. I didn't get their name, and there
were a bunch of deputy chiefs there, but they were like,
(13:02):
we need to bulldoze these front doors because they're acting
as a damn. So they bulldozed the doors and let
the water out and kind of saved the day. But
that was I mean, imagine being pinned beneath this rubble
and now you might accidentally drown.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Like what a day.
Speaker 4 (13:17):
Yeah, it was. It was a tragedy that still looms large.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
And maybe we should take a break and talk about
what happened and why this happened right after this.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
So, Chuck, there were so many people and very fortunately,
like you said, they were near a few hospitals, but
they ended up requiring seventeen emergency rooms for this.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
They construction companies came in and were donating forklifts, they
were donating cranes, people were donating their own personal equipment.
Everybody basically came and chipped in. You mentioned those front
doors being knocked down. They ended up knocking holes through
the entire front of the hotel, not holes like there
(14:26):
was no front of the hotel because they had to
get a crane in there eventually. Because all the equipment
that they were trying to get forklifts, I mean, you
name it, to try and lift these concrete slabs, it
was just pushing everything out of the way. So they
ended up having to bring in, like, you know, the
most heavy duty construction crane you can imagine to pull
these things up eventually.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
So I saw, Chuck that like there were all these
amazing acts of people of generosity, of heroism, and just
people coming together. And I also saw from some of
the people who were involved that within our of the tragedy,
the mood did like a one to eighty, and people
started to want to know what happened, what had gone wrong,
(15:09):
and who was to blame, because it was very clearly
something had gone terribly wrong with the structure of those skywalks,
and people wanted to know why because again, this was
just such a catastrophic loss of life it was almost incomprehensible.
But it started to settle in that it had happened
and that somebody somewhere was to blame and people wanted
(15:29):
to know.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
So what they eventually figured out, and this was after
some pretty amazing investigation by the National Bureau of Standards
which is now the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
They were I mean they did they X rayed material,
they did metallurgical examinations of steel, they did, you know,
(15:53):
physics tests, They did everything you could imagine to figure
out what went wrong and what they landed on. It
turns out they didn't really need to do any of
those tests. It was a design change that was, as
it turns out, basically rubber stamped. The original design of
these walkways that were again two and four were suspended
(16:15):
above each other, and floor number three, which didn't collapse,
was just offset from that one kind of over the
center of the atrium. But the original design called for
these skywalks to be held together with one, you know,
group of continuous steel rods that went through both floors,
and all the sets of these hollow beams threaded with nuts.
(16:37):
But this was like, you know, forty five feet or
so of threaded rod. And they said, you know what,
threading wears out, and if you thread a nut forty
five feet, that's a long way, and eventually by the
time you get to where you want to go that
things are not going to be as strong as it
needs to be. So they changed the design to basically
hang the second floor from the first the fourth floor
(17:00):
using two sets of rods instead of one continuous set,
which basically double the weight of what everything was hanging
on on floor four. There's a great YouTube video. I
believe the guy is English. His name is Tom Scott,
but he got an engineer, this guy named Grady from
Practical Engineers, who put it like this. Imagine a long
(17:24):
rope that two friends are hanging on. One person's hanging
above the other. That's fine. Then imagine that same rope
with the same two people hanging but in this case,
the second person is hanging from the other person's ankles,
so the total weight is the same, but the stress
on that first person or in this case, that first
(17:45):
top fourth floor is different.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
I saw a guy named Bill Quip Klapman who said
flagpole instead of rope. So I think that kind of
demonstrates Chuck that because it's such an easy analogy that
you could have looked at these designs and I mean
you specifically and me and been like, are you sure
this is the same as what you guys originally had,
(18:08):
Like as far as the math goes, it was, I
wouldn't have So it was so radically different, But at
the same time, it seemed like, yeah, it's a no brainer.
Of course that's what you're gonna do, because not only
are those could those threads wear out? Like how you're
gonna have to put the entire skywalk on each of
(18:30):
those six threads, those six hanging rods threaded hanging rods,
Like you're gonna have to slide them down, and of
course you're gonna damage some of those threads and then
they're totally useless. You won't be able to screw those
nuts all the way up to the bottom of the
skywalk any longer. So what you're gonna do? You just
cut it in half. It makes total sense. It's still
(18:50):
the same general design. The two skywalks are hanging from
the ceiling, but like you said, now, the second floor
skywalk is hanging from the fourth floor skywalk. That was
a catastrophic mistake because the skywalks themselves were in no way,
shape or form designed to hold up their own weight,
(19:10):
and they were attached on either end to basically portals
that led to the hallways that continued on the fourth,
second and third floor on either side. Those connections to
those portals were in no way, shape or form designed
to hold the walkway up. So I think I said.
They spanned the entire length of the atrium, which is
one hundred and twenty feet, So these were one hundred
(19:32):
and twenty feet long skywalks, and they had brass handrails
at waist high, and then between that and the skywalk
was class It was super cool looking, super late seventies
early eighties design.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
They were attached to the end hallways on either side,
so they were basically like the hallways were just suddenly
stripped of everything around them except for the part you
walked on, and that's what crossed to the tre It's
pretty cool. And they were attached to the hallways that
continued on either side through portals, and the actual span
(20:10):
itself was held aloft by three box beams that were
perpendicular to the length of the walkways themselves. Right, So
you had basically it looked like a kid swing, but
three of them, and then you had the walkway spanning
those three things. Does that make sense?
Speaker 4 (20:29):
I think so.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
So the walkway was held up by those three box
beams that were held aloft each by two hanging rods,
and it just it just couldn't do it. What's surprising
to me is that it lasted a full year after
it opened.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
You know, yeah, I mean, I guess we could go
over the load bearing here. That seems to be a
pretty good place for it. The NBS, like I said,
he was doing the investigating. They you know, they did testing.
They built their own version of this stuff, and they
went and found that the load bearing capacity for just
(21:09):
one individual connection was eighty one killo newtons, which I've
never heard of before.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
To clear things up, chuck, a kill a newton is
equal to one kilogram meter per second squared, So I'm.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Sure that clears it up for everybody. Right, And that's
just the you know, that's called the dead low. That's
the way to the structure itself. If you have people
on it, obviously it's going to be a lot different.
And there were a lot of people on this. They
were up there having a good time and dancing and partying.
They said that would add another eleven killo newtons, So
(21:45):
eventually you get to a total you know, by the
time it collapsed, a total weight of ninety five killer newtons,
which was fourteen more than it was even supposed to
hold to begin with.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Right, that's just like, that's how it was in reality.
The thing that makes it even worse to me is
that that doesn't meet code at all. Like code is
that you would have to basically double that amount of
load bearing capacity to have passed inspection. And yet these
things passed inspection.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
Oh at the time it was double yes.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
Yeah, yeah, that wasn't a change. Like this thing passed
inspection despite the code requiring it to be able to
support one hundred and eighty one killer newtons. Like you said,
they were able to support eighty one killer newtons. So
it was a terrible design. And the only explanation was
that the actual explanation that when they changed that design
(22:42):
from the singular rods, which is two guys hanging separately
on a fire pole or a rope rather than hanging
on their ankles, when they changed it, no one did
the calculations to see if it would hold up. And
that is exactly what happened.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
Yeah, they you know, they did.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Of course, something like this happens, you're gonna inspect, like
the welding, you're gonna inspect the steel.
Speaker 4 (23:05):
I know.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
They subpoened the actual steel manufacturer and the welding company
and the GC and like basically everybody involved. And what
they found was this thing basically like the welds would
eventually rip. They had these two sort of sea bracket
beams that they welded together to form one hollow, squared beam,
(23:28):
and the rods ran through the middle of these and
those did split, and the bolts basically pulled. You can
see pictures where it just pulled right up through the
center of them. But they said that this would have
happened anyway even if it was like a solid steel
beam and not too welded together.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
It wasn't because the welds.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
It wasn't because of anything basically other than the fact
that this design change made it almost inevitable.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
So this design change was done by the steel fabricator
on what are called shop drawings, and shop drawings are
basically like a close up explanation of exactly how you're
supposed to manufacture what the engineer or the architect wants right,
And the steel fabricator says that they called the architect
(24:12):
in charge, a guy named Daniel Duncan, and got his
approval over the phone to change the rods from one
single rod to two rods split in half.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
And that was it.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
There was no no one on the steel fabricator side
did the calculations, and yet they stamped their approval on it.
Dan Duncan didn't do the calculations, and yet he stamped
his approval on it. And then a guy named Jack Gillham,
who was the art of the engineer of record who
Dan Duncan worked for and was in charge of this project,
(24:46):
he didn't do the calculations and he stamped a steal
of approval on that change as well. So it made
it through. It made it through the process. That it's
supposed to go through. And when you're sitting there building this,
or when you're sitting there putting all this together and
you're looking at this and it's got all three stamps
that it's supposed to have, you're pretty sure that it's
the way it's supposed to be. People don't stop and
(25:08):
question that kind of thing, or at least they didn't
during this construction phase.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
I think that's so important to remember, because I think
people stop all the time and say things aren't safe
and that we should revisit stuff. Yeah, but they didn't
hear there was even apparently, you know, in interviews after
the fact, there were crew from the build site that
we're saying like they saw these beams sort of stressing
and bending a little bit when they were putting this
(25:34):
thing together. There was a collapse earlier, a huge section
of the roof collapse on this building in the middle
of the night while they were building it. So this
was a project that already had sort of one near
tragedy averted on its hands, and it was just sort
of pushed through and no one spoke up. And of
(25:56):
course I'm not blaming the builder who saw the steel,
but like, you know, everyone should be able to stand
up and say and not just assume that someone else
knows what they're doing when it comes to a project
like this.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Yeah, I think that's essential, and I think that this
disaster actually kind of helped change that too. That was
one of the things that did change. So I'd say, Chuck,
we take a break and come back and talk about
some of the fallout from this.
Speaker 4 (26:23):
All right, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
So before we broke, you mentioned a guy named Jack Gillham,
who was the engineer in charge of the project.
Speaker 4 (26:56):
Gillham would go on to be a public speaker.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
He later went on to say, you know that the
problem this is a quote was so obvious that a
first year engineering student could have figured it out too.
Speaker 4 (27:10):
Little, too late.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Obviously, there was a tribunal form by the Missouri Board
of Professional Engineers in nineteen eighty four in the years
following that ruled it they were grossly negligent. The phone
approval was obviously grossly negligent, and there was quote a
conscious indifference to professional duty.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
So how does that happen?
Speaker 1 (27:35):
It was a time where there was a lot of
production and construction being rushed through, not just there but
all over the place the late seventies in the early eighties,
it just seems like there were a lot of fast
track projects. There wasn't as much oversight, there weren't as
many rules in place, and there was a lot of
(27:56):
stuff ed. Who helped us out with this pointed out
the Kemper Arena roof collapse in seventy nine. The Hartford
Civic Center had another collapse in the year before in
seventy eight. The chat Plain Towers in Miami that collapsed
in twenty twenty one, they were built in that time,
in the late seventies and early eighties, So it just
seems like it was a time where you know, people
(28:19):
were probably just rushing around trying to make money. Greed
is always a factor, I think in stuff like this
and just trying to build bill build.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
So yeah, but.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Yeah, and there were it was a cascading chain of
failures to not pass the buck, to actually stop and
look at things. But you can really lay at the
most at Duncan and Gilliam's feet, and that tribunal that
Gillam went through found, like you said, that he was
grossly negligent, But the way that they proved his negligence
(28:50):
was that his firm had a policy that the engineer
of record on any project had to verify all plans
and all changes them before stamping.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
It with approval.
Speaker 3 (29:03):
And the fact that he had failed to meet his
own requirements, that tribunal said, that's proof positive that you
were negligent in this. And then they also said, apparently
he had a lot of pushback that he was giving.
He would not accept responsibility. He deflected it at every turn,
and it was so his attitude about it was so cavalier.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
They said that.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
They cited it as an additional breach of professional obligations.
It was that bad that, like his refusal accept responsibility,
was yet another piece of negligence that happened after the fact.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
Yeah, and you know, if all this stuff sounds criminal,
none of it rose to any kind of criminal proceeding.
Speaker 4 (29:51):
It was a civil legal quagmire.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Like we said, it was owned by Hallmark Cards, this
building and the ones around and there were one hundred
and thirty plus lawsuits. They didn't all get together and
kind of go after them together, which you know sometimes
can happen.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
They were fragmented.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Some people went at it alone, some people got together
with you know a few other people. And there were
one hundred and thirty suits plus total, seeking more than
three billion dollars in damages. The hotel costs fifty million
dollars to build to begin with, like the entire operation,
And depending on the cases, they always settled, sometimes kind
(30:34):
of right up until they were supposed to go to trial.
But they did settle all of them in various ways.
There was a woman named Winfred Witscher who got five
hundred dollars because her face got cut. There was a
widow and four kids of Henry Botnan who got six
hundred thousand dollars. Different federal courts would come in or
(30:57):
different judges would come in and basically say all right,
let's let's get together on a large settlement when it
ended up being one thousand dollars to basically anybody who
could prove they were there period, like whether or not
they were injured. If you could prove you were there,
you would get a thousand bucks.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Yeah, and I guess waive any right to sue after
that point. Well, sure, But they ended up paying out
something like one hundred and forty million dollars. Most of
it came from Hallmark.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
Yeah, I saw one fifty well, and that's.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
In early eighties dollars, I believe, right.
Speaker 4 (31:29):
Yeah, I mean not close to the three bill.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
No, no, no, for sure.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
But they Hallmark ended up paying out, mostly because they
were the ultimate owner of that hotel, and from what
I saw, they were. There was a guy who was
suing Hallmark, but Hallmark settled, and the lawyer had done
all this extensive research and discovery and it basically found
that Hallmark was really more culpable than anyone thought, and
(31:57):
Hallmark's Hallmark settled. The thing never got published, but I
got the impression that's why Hallmark ended up spending the
most money out of anybody to settle these claims.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
And the.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
Whole experience just tore the town apart because there were
people who wanted to get to the truth and wanted,
you know, retribution, and apparently the business community really wanted
to kind of sweep it under the rug for a
lot of different reasons. But I think a lot of
the boosters were like, this is a black eye on
the city. I saw it described as and the Kansas
City Star and the Kansas City Times said no, no, no,
(32:35):
we're going to report on this. Even in the face
of community pushback, I guess, and they won pulisers for
their reporting for local reporting because they got to the
bottom of what actually happened.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Yeah, there was a guy, like you said, there was
a news crew on the scene anyway for the tea dance,
and this cameraman was filming a lot of the aftermath,
and he had people there that were victims that were
coming up trying to like rip his camera away and
start a fight with the guy, saying he shouldn't be
shooting that stuff. But people came to his defense in
(33:11):
the moment. What I don't get is how I mean,
I know Hallmark ultimately will pay because they were the
parent company, But how did someone say they were more
culpable than when it's really obvious that it was a
design change that was rubber stamped by this design firm, Like,
what did Hallmark? It's not like they ran that up
(33:32):
the greeting card chain and they said, yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
This is the impression I have that the whole thing
was fast and loose and cutting corners was in part
because Hallmark or the subsidiary Hallmark owned the hotel, was
cheaping out and one of the one piece of evidence
I saw that kind of puts that together was from Gillham,
who one of his defenses was I asked for on
(33:59):
site in spaces, at the metal fabricators, at the job site, everywhere,
and Hallmark wouldn't shell out the extra money to make
that happen. Had there been an inspector on site, then
this would have never happened kind of thing. So I
think one of the reasons why the business community wanted
to sweep it on the rug is Hallmark is the
(34:19):
It was, at least at the time, the far and
away the largest employer in Kansas City, very much beloved.
A lot of people owed their livelihood to Hallmark, Their
kids went to college because of Hallmark. It was a
really well regarded company. And apparently that that was that
facade or whatever, that image was attacked by the Times
(34:42):
in the Star. And that was one reason why some
people were so against that reporting, because even if you
didn't have anything to hide, but you still had an
affinity for Hallmark because they were your employer, you might
be upset at the news for reporting that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Even sure, a lot of the many millions of dollars
were ear Mark for charities that Hallmark donated to as
part of.
Speaker 4 (35:03):
These plea deals.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Hyatt actually sued for four million dollars, but not Hallmark.
They sued the design firm. They sued twelve different parties,
including the design firm, the GC, the steel manufacturer that
I could not find out what happened with those lawsuits,
which was really frustrating.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
But there were lawsuits all over the place.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Yeah, it was a mess. And as you would expect,
and like I said to this, the shadow hung over
the entire city for a decade. Apparently it came in
a really terrible time because the city had just gone
through a burst of prosperity, I think, and this hotel
was kind of a symbol of that, and so it
kind of really shook the foundations of this kind of
exuberant Kansas City. Like you know how like when you're
(35:48):
the more excited you are, the more happy you are,
the harder you fall when something comes along and just
completely undermines that. I get the impression that that was
kind of what up into Kansas City. It took a
long time for it to recover. It wasn't until two
thousand and eight that they even managed to erect a
memorial because Apparently there's so many people who didn't want
(36:09):
to think about it or talk about it or memorialize it.
But somebody, some of the survivor's family or some of
the victims' families got together and created a memorial at
a park just a block or so away, and Hallmark
kicked in twenty five thousand dollars.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
That's right to build the memorial itself.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
It is still there, the higher regency is and those
that atream is still there, and the walkway on the
second floor is still there. Of course, it's not held
up by it's not suspended. It is held from underneath
by columns and obvious And you know, I mentioned the
PTSD for first responders. That was a big push after this,
and then also just you know, a general tightening up
(36:55):
of and this wasn't just in Kansas City, this was
an international incident. So it really shook up the industry
as far as how fast and loose things were going overall.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
Yeah, I know the asse. The American Society of Civil
Engineers came out and said, unambiguously, if you're the engineer
of record, you have to verify every single change or
you are completely responsible for anything that happens as a
result of that. It's on you, like, just want to
make sure we're clear about that. And that was that
(37:28):
was a change that came directly from that and from
Gillham himself.
Speaker 4 (37:31):
Well, the buck has to stop with somebody.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
It was a situation where everybody was finger pointing and
when when you can point to a single decision that
that caused this and not like well it was sort
of this and this and this right like that these
things had had they not even had that tea dance,
eventually they would have collapsed.
Speaker 4 (37:53):
They just weren't built correctly.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Yeah, it's uh, it's nuts.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
I saw that even the original design wouldn't have met
code for holding up people, wouldn't have reached those killing
newtons that it needed.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
You got anything else, No, I got nothing else. Big
shout out to the people of Kansas City. I hope
to do a show there one day. We did go
to Lawrence, Kansas and Saint Louis in the general area,
but we have not hit Kansas City yet.
Speaker 4 (38:22):
So we'll do that one day.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
Yes, one day we will for sure. And since Chuck
just promised Kansas City we're going to come to a show.
Of course, he unlocked listener mail.
Speaker 4 (38:34):
I'm gonna call this just something a little lighter.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
I think we could use it, yeah, because we inadvertently well,
I'll just read it. Hey, guys, been listening to the
show for about six years. My first time writing in
to highlight an ongoing mistake that is nonetheless hilarious and
I assume completely unintentional. During the twenty two Halloween episode,
Josh voice one of the great characters in English literature,
(38:59):
Megal in the toll House. But in subsequent episodes, when
you guys, namely Chuck, tries to get Josh to do
the voice, he refers to him as Smiegel. Spiegel, of course,
is the hobbit from the Lord of the Rings who's
corrupted by the One Ring and eventually transformed into Gollum.
After hearing this, I went back and red listened to
the twenty twenty two Halloween episode again, and I can
(39:20):
sure I can assure you that the toll House is
even better second time around. First, and now I can
just imagine a mixture of Josh and Andy serkis narrating
the dialogue of Smiegele Gollum as the Meagle character in question.
I almost didn't want to write in because of this
to make you aware of.
Speaker 4 (39:35):
This hilarious error.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Though I assume someone will eventually beat me to it,
but not true. Josh Bills Borrow, you were the first
to write in. We did get a couple of people
that wrote in after you though that Yeah, he were first,
Ease and Josh is from Madison, Connecticut.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Way to go, Josh, thanks for that.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
Thanks to everybody who wrote in to say the same thing,
because it is pretty hilarious.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Maybe that's why I'm if I Migle's been off.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
I've been accidentally doing sgle proughly. So well, we'll get
to the bottom of that, everybody. I promise Megel will
be back someday.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Someday.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
Uh And if you want to get in touch of this,
like Josh at all did, you can send us an
email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
You Know, Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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