TEASER: From Cautionary Tales: Death on the Floor
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I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. Hey listeners, today we're doing things a little differently. We're sharing with you a preview of Cautionary Tales, a podcast about the valuable lessons we can learn from tragedies throughout history.

Best-selling author Tim Harford takes you on a wild ride through the extremes that human behavior and nature can throw at us. Some stories will delight you. Others, like the one I'm about to share, may scare you, but they'll all make you wiser. Picture this. It's a sweltering Kansas City July night in 1981, and hundreds of dance contestants are enjoying a Friday night of revelry in the futuristic Hyatt Regency Hotel.

The dance floor is buzzing, the orchestra is belting out tunes, and everyone is having a ball when, suddenly, a shark crack reverberates above the din of the dance floor. Three massive skywalks above the lobby had ripped from their cables, spraying partygoers with more than 60 tons of steel and glass, and burying many under piles of rubble and concrete. What had gone so tragically wrong? Was it simply bad architectural design? What deathly mistake was made, and who made it? You'll have to listen to find out.

We hope you enjoyed the preview as much as we did. Hear the full story of the Hyatt Regency Hotel disaster and more episodes of Cautionary Tales wherever you get your podcasts. Friday night at the Hyatt Regency, one of Kansas City's most popular dates since the hotel opened just a year earlier. There are queues at the lobby bar. The place is buzzing. It's the summer of 1981, but the orchestra is belting out the big band sounds of the 40s and 50s.

Dance contestants with numbers pinned to their backs are doing the Mambo and the East Coast Swing.

But while the music is nostalgic, the hotel lobby is distinctly space age. It's big and airy, with a glass wall letting in the light and three walkways, skywalks crossing the space on the second, third and fourth floors. They're suspended from the ceiling so that the lobby itself is unobstructed by columns, all the more room for dancing.

Cindy Paulson briefly looks down from the Terrace Restaurant to see if she can see her father out on the dance floor. The restaurant, on a large mezzanine overlooking the lobby, provides the perfect view. But the lobby floor is packed and she can't pick him out of the crowd. After a moment, she goes back to work. Cindy's a college student. Her family live in town. Being a hostess at the Hyatt is her summer job. It's five past seven in the evening.

Cindy will always remember that, because she glances across the lobby, out through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall, and sees the time on the clock on the bank just across the street. Then there's a sharp crack, clearly audible, even above the music and the loud buzz of conversation. Cindy's eyes refocus from the distant clock to the skywalks in front of her, but she can't believe what she's seeing.

I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. Dr Joseph Wackerley got the call almost immediately from emergency dispatchers. We need you at the Hyatt. He grabbed a stethoscope and scrubs and ran to his car.

Wackerley, just 35 years old, had already served as the director of Kansas City's emergency medical system. He rushed to the scene. When Wackerley arrived at the Hyatt, it was lit by the flashing lights of ambulances. Amid the crowd, there were dozens of injured people. Some were bleeding, others had broken bones. Some were lying on stretchers. Wackerley sprang into action, checking who needed assistance most urgently. Then a paramedic grabbed him.

You're in the wrong place, he said. The real casualties are inside the hotel. You need to get inside.

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The lobby was no longer airy and bathed in evening sunlight. It was coated in concrete dust. The skywalks no longer levitated across the atrium. Two of them had fallen, crunching onto the busy dance floor. Voices were calling out for help. Electric cables were swinging loose. Arcs of electricity sending flashes of light across the dim space.

Somewhere high above, a pipe had fractured and water was gushing onto the lobby floor. It was six inches deep already and threatened to submerge those who were trapped, if anyone had survived the impact, that is. Wackley could see arms and legs sticking out of the rubble.

Dr. Wackerley took charge of the medical operation. It was bolstered by a huge voluntary effort, with taxis, buses and private cars helping the ambulances to get injured people to hospitals. Locals were doing whatever they could to tend to the walking wounded, free the trapped and comfort families. Among them was Cindy Paulson, the restaurant hostess. She'd helped evacuate the diners at the restaurant, but then she'd returned to the lobby.

Somewhere in the middle of that mess was her father. She moved through the lobby, doing what she could. She comforted one couple, pinned under the wreckage. After firefighters were able to free them, Cindy kept looking for her father. 250 miles away in St Louis, Jack Gillum and his wife arrived home to find the telephone ringing. The call was from one of the architects at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

Jack Gillum was stunned. He was the structural engineer of record for the Hyatt Regency Hotel's construction. That meant he was the one who'd signed off on all the designs, certifying that they were safe. And now Gillum was being told that those elegant walkways across the hotel lobby had fallen out of the sky and smashed into the crowd of people below.

Reeling, Gillum could hardly think. He stammered out an approximate answer. Each of those airy-looking skywalks weighed over 30 tonnes. A single walkway section weighed about 8 tonnes. They were going to need cranes.

Gillum managed to charter a plane and fly over, arriving a few hours into the rescue effort. Whatever he expected to see, the disaster was worse. But his job now was to try to figure out how the structure had failed. This was a brand new building. It looked bold, but the engineering was simple enough. Somehow, the structure had failed catastrophically. Somehow, they'd missed something. But what?

That was a preview of Cautionary Tales from Pushkin Industries. You can listen to more episodes of Cautionary Tales wherever you get your podcasts.