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