[Don B.]

This article is making a mountain out of a molehill. It is nothing like the Titanic disaster in any way, shape or form, starting with the fact that more than 15 times as many people died on the Titanic. The Titanic also sank in a time when the world was much smaller. Just scaling the death toll of the Titanic disaster up to the U.S. population today (more than three times larger), the Hyatt disaster would have needed to kill about 5,000 people to have the same net effect. The words Titanic Disaster and Hyatt Disaster have virtually nothing in common, and don't even belong in the same sentence.

There's another really fundamental difference: The operators of the hotel had no idea of the danger; they didn't ignore repeated ice warnings as the Titanic sailed into the western ocean that fateful Sunday, April 14, 1912. The operators of the hotel were given a flawed device which failed; although there were some design and construction flaws with the Titanic, her crew negligently and recklessly smashed the ship into an iceberg while traveling at the fastest speed the doomed ship had ever achieved in her short existence on this planet. The Titanic received no less than seven ice warnings by wireless as the day progressed. Had these been plotted on a map, the ship's crew would have realized they were steaming into a massive ice field that completely blocked their course. In addition, as Sunday wore on, the temperatures dropped (both air and water), signaling they were fast approaching an ice field. Yet, the ship's crew lit even more boilers and pushed the ship faster and faster. The Titanic's speed accelerated from about 20 knots on the first day of her maiden voyage, to 22 knots on the third day and finally 24 knots on that fateful Sunday.

Kansas City was not "draped in grief." It didn't spend "years recovering." I was 14 years old at the time; my mom and her then boyfriend Charlie were supposed to have been there that night, but my mom didn't feel well and stayed home.

Give that my father died in a car accident just one year earlier, and I could have lost my mother as well, I just never viewed this as being anything other than a simple tragedy.

The New York Times is over-sensationalizing the Hyatt Skywalks Collapse to sell newspapers. It is modern yellow-journalism at it's worst.

--don