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Excerpt
The Pulitzer-winning investigation in the Kansas City Star that followed the incident pinpointed the problem accurately. The original architectural design had called for long vertical suspension rods passing through crossbars at both walkway tiers that were secured by large washers and nuts at both levels of support. But to construct it this way would have required threading those rods for several feet to permit the nuts to be screwed in all the way up to the higher walkway. Sometime during construction, somebody had thought of a simpler way. Instead of long rods supporting both levels, it would be much easier to suspend the upper walkway alone from shorter rods. That way the lower walkway could be suspended from the upper walkway by separate rods, thus requiring threading only at the rods’ ends. But in changing over, no one had stopped to think that those washers and nuts that supported the upper walkway would then be forced to support the double weight of the walkways rather than just the upper, as in the original design. When all those dancers began swaying to “Satin Doll” on a hot July night, the load limit was slightly exceeded.
Any of us gazing silently at the Hyatt Regency ceiling could hardly have cast a first stone if we had looked candidly at our own complication records. Like the disgraced engineers, each of us in our training careers had faced loss of life among those in our trust, and each of us had made more errors in technique and judgment than we would ever publicly admit.
The British Institution of Structural Engineers defines its discipline as:
If one substitutes the words, “human tissue manipulations” for “buildings, bridges, frameworks and other similar structures,” what remains is a creditable definition of surgery. Both professions espouse a union of science and art, and both target lasting structural integrity.
Though at first blush many of us might disavow any kinship with our wonky brethren, it is striking how similar are our attitudes, our goals, and our terrors. We suspend faces, necks, eyelids, and breasts in graceful curves from fixed points. We balance breaking strength against local tolerances in selecting suture. We assess wear, friction, and vectors in repairing moving parts. We use all manner of bracing in immobilizing bones. We assess tensions and loads in tendon surgery. And we apply precise wave energy to our tasks in the form of laser, ultrasound, and Doppler sonar.
But more important, we exercise the scrupulous discipline of reviewing our failures amongst our colleagues, adding to the collective body of safety data in our respective fields. Though the disasters in both professions are aired in the most public of venues, our mundane misadventures quietly produce the fine tuning through which our forward progress is made.
The similarities permeate the history of both professions. It was Daedalus, after all, who designed the wings that could carry his son Icarus and himself away from the deadly Minotaur—so long as the wings were exercised within tight design specifications.
