*Hyatt Regency walkway collapse*

Cited as an example of a code-revision-triggering catastrophe ("over a hundred people, maybe two hundred people, got killed"). Will be treated more fully later.

One of the things I want to talk about in codes and standards is, you were taught as a student that you need to learn how to design things, but no one ever told you that you have limitations on your design which are written into law that say you cannot do certain things. So there's the good of codes and standards: they are a historical repository of things that went bad. The Hyatt Regency walkway collapse, we'll probably talk about — where I think over a hundred people, maybe two hundred people, got killed. The Northridge earthquake in Southern California. When there's a major problem, they often revise the code or standard to make things safer. After 9/11 they revised a lot of the building egress code so people could get out of buildings faster, so the fire wouldn't bring the building down as quickly. Their interpretations of the code — codes are not always the easiest things to read.