Jump to content

Wikipedia:Valued picture candidates/HRWalkway.svg

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Original - (a) Original connection design of the St. Louis Hyatt Regency (b) Modified design that ultimately led to the failure of the walkway
Not for voting - Failed cross beam discovered by investigators.
Reason
A little background is needed here. For civil engineering students, two of the most cited structural failures in the United States are that of Galloping Gertie and the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. In the lobby of the Hyatt Regency in St. Louis, hung two elevated walkways that connected two sides of the building through the atrium. The two walkways were initially designed to be supported by rods from the ceiling girders, with one nut on each rod holding the upper walkway (a) and another nut below that holding the lower walkway. Due to construction issues, the design was changed to that shown in (b). Unfortunately, this meant that the nut previously used only to support the upper walkway now had to support both the weight of the upper and lower walkways. In addition, the cross beams of the upper walkway were also taking twice the intended load. The cross beams were designed as double C-channels welded together. The weld and channels were only designed to take the weight of one walkway, but the design change doubled that. On the night of collapse, 2,000 people were gathered in the atrium, many of them on the walkways. Due to the excessive weight, the walkways collapsed, killing 114 people and injuring 200 others. It was the worst structural failure (in terms of lives lost) at the time (and, as far as I'm aware, the worst unintentional structural failure to date). It shows how such a small difference can have a drastic outcome. The image is a simple representation of a death sentence to more than a hundred people. Please see the article for more information; it's really a fascinating story. Also listed below the nominated image is the resulting (failed) cross beam.
Articles this image appears in
Structural engineering, Hyatt Regency walkway collapse
Creator
DTR
Time Requirement
checkY Added to Hyatt Regency walkway collapse June 2007. ~ ωαdεstεr16«talkstalk» 18:50, 27 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Image Page Traffic Statistics
March 2009

More input, please. ~ ωαdεstεr16«talkstalk» 06:23, 3 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support. MER-C 08:13, 3 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support very informative—Chris! ct 19:09, 4 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose not clear to me what the 2P, P etc means. The caption doesn't explain it, the image itself could (in my opinion) be knocked up in less than an hour in Visio or similar. This does has encyclopedic value, but it makes me wonder how many "technical" drawings I could create in a few moments with a simple caption that may be considered similarly. Yes, the story behind the failure is of note but this image for me isn't particularly special. The Rambling Man (talk) 00:51, 5 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted Image:HRWalkway.svg ~ ωαdεstεr16«talkstalk» 15:06, 6 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]