Jumbotron collapses onto court (NOT @KU)

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HawkErrant
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b82, g84 Lift the chorus...

5 years 7 months ago #19240 by HawkErrant

Yikes

Thankfully no one was hurt!

Architectural/mechanical failures always weird me out.

Department store collapse in Seoul while we were there in the early '90s.

Kemper Arena roof collapsing due to weather two days before the 1979 Yes concert I had tickets for (and thinking about it, I don't remember if I got my money back or just counted myself lucky to be alive!)

Hyatt Regency Skywalks 1981 - summer between my junior and senior years at KU. I had been on them with friends just the week before the fatal tea party collapse that July; my wife lost family and friends from it; some of my old Army friends from Fort Leavenworth were at the Hyatt heading for the skywalks when they fell.

Yikes! Yikes! Yikes!

(I have more weird "coincidentally I was around or going there" events -- not all architectural/mechanical failures -- most of them linked with me getting reassignment orders -- but I'll leave them for later... maybe... Yikes!)

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." - Mark Twain "Innocents Abroad"

The following user(s) said Thank You: gorillahawk, murphyslaw

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Bayhawk
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5 years 7 months ago #19241 by Bayhawk

Thanks for your subject line

I was there for the Hyatt Skywalk . . . man o' man . . .

Forty-two days and counting,

RC

The end is nothing; the road is all.
-- Jules Michelet

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sasnak
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5 years 7 months ago #19242 by sasnak

I was supposed to be at the tea dance that evening. I was going to go with a friend and her husband but he had to work late so didn't go.Also lost family of friends in that one.

It'll feel better when it stops hurting

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NotOstertag
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5 years 7 months ago #19243 by NotOstertag

The skywalks was so tragic. I was a 13 year old kid and remember seeing all kinds of funerals in the week or so that followed.

Ironically we got a puppy a couple months later who was born on the night of that tragedy, and named him "Luke" after Luke Skywalker from Star Wars.

Kemper was creepy too...imagine how different that could have turned out.

I'm interested to see what happened at GW. There's a LOT of engineering behind suspending those things, both with the building (where you can anchor things, where you can't) and every other bit of equipment that is sued to suspend it, right down to the bolts that attach everything. There's also usually some kind of redundancy. If I were to guess (based on ZERO information at this point) I'd wager that it was human error and not a structural or equipment failure.

"When I was a freshman, I remember Coach Naismith telling us how important it was to play good defense." - Mitch Lightfoot

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