A woman in China was killed in an escalator accident last month. At the top of the escalator, she fell through a loose floor panel and just managed to hand her toddler off to store employees before her legs got caught in the machinery, dragging her in and killing her.
Snopes article here, with diagram and pixellated surveillance-camera video:
The LiveLeak video doesn’t contain any gore, but I still found it very unsettling to watch as this woman disappeared under the floor; it’s horror-movie material.
Question: could this sort of thing happen in the US, or are there automatic safety devices (i.e. not just e-stop buttons that require deliberate action)) that shut the system down if a foreign object starts to get dragged under?
Yeah, not the only such accident in China either. I seem to recall that another guy lost his leg in, IIRC, Shanghai and there are a lot of injuries…this is sort of like the infamous Chinese high speed train thing that happened a few years ago. The regulations are there, but they are selectively enforced depending on the whims of the party and who gets affected. And how powerful (or not) they are. Oh, and who and how they complain and whether that complaint is something the party can use against another faction or feels is a threat to them.
I don’t think that something like what happened to this woman could happen in the US, though I suppose anything is possible. But quality control, as well as regulations (that we actually would have to follow) would prevent something along those lines. This isn’t to say that accidents don’t happen on escalators in the US, but nothing like that.
ETA: A quick Google search seems to indicate that most US accidents don’t involve a catastrophic failure of the device, but instead involve trips and slips (as well as accidents involved in maintenance and installation). The other seem to involve snagged clothing or shoes, though many of these seem to be small children.
There was a big panic in a Bangkok shopping mall a few days ago when an escalator “collapsed,” according to news reports. Seems a dropped coin gummed up the works. Not sure what they meant by “collapsed,” but the Chinese incidents have been played up in the local media, thus the panic.
No, I meant ostensibly. Local codes may alter or change parts of the ASME standards. I know this because of why I used to know the ASME standards for elevators and escalators so well.
Ah. Interesting, because I don’t believe we (in Ontario anyway) have any latitude with ASME codes. We have our own federal and provincial standards, but they all point to ASME, and there’s no fucking around with ASME codes.
I wish I knew what if anything the women in the video were saying. After watching the uncensored video it seems pretty clear the first two women to go up the escalator seemed to trip on the floor tile and they were obviously concerned about it, boy were they lucky they didn’t get sucked into that thing. You’d think they would have tried to warn that lady and maybe they were it’s pretty hard to tell. I think I would have screamed at the top of my lungs for the lady to turn around, but maybe they didn’t realize how dangerous the situation actually was, or it just happened too quickly for them not to freeze up and hesitate.
Definitely horror movie material, at least the woman knew she saved her son, but I can only imagine what must have gone through her head, knowing you were about to be crushed to death in like three seconds.
Every single escalator I have ever seen has at either end an emergency cut off button that instantly kills the power, why on earth did those two people watch her get sucked under and not one of them tried to hit the button?
I doubt the other people realized the danger. I don’t think I would have. It would have looked like someone fell into a hole and my instinct would be to help them out of the hole. Until now, I didn’t know enough about escalators to know there was dangerous machinery there. I would have thought of it soon, but if it all happened in seconds I probably would have thought the principal danger was the visible one, her falling, and not have time to think about what she was falling into.
This is not a trait that’s limited to totalitarian societies. There’s a reason why the label “hero” is applied to so few people: Most folks in any society freeze up or panic unhelpfully in a stressful situation like this.
And I’ve never heard of escalators in the US causing serious injury, but I have heard of them eating objects like shoes.
Imagine for a moment that you have no experience with industrial equipment, and that you have never heard of the concept of an emergency stop button, and that you’ve never been trained about the safety issues associated with escalators. One of the complaints I saw in the news articles about this incident is that these store employees had no training with regard to the escalator; it’s likely that they didn’t even know where the E-stop button was (this being China, there’s a strong possibility that this escalator didn’t even have an E-stop button).
The motor and associated drivetrain must be strong enough to keep the escalator moving uphill when there are perhaps as many as a dozen people on it. That means it’s capable of exerting at least a couple thousand pounds of force, and probably quite a bit more. So to drag a single flesh-and-bones woman into the underside of the conveyor was surely no trouble it all for it. Most industrial machinery in the US that is capable of dragging people in and shredding them is fitted with safety devices that prevent that from happening, e.g. guard plates or paddles/bars that shut the machine off when a body contacts them. That’s why I started wondering if escalators (in the US at least) might have the same sorts of safety devices built into them.
A woman died on an escalator near where we live about twelve years ago. I’ve ridden that escalator, before and since. According to the article, somehow her head got caught between the handrail and the wall.
Also, when I was in high school, a child’s foot was caught in the escalator at a mall near my house. This was in December, and the mall sent the store Santa to keep the child calm while the fire department got her out.
I once rescued a kid that was getting his shoelace sucked into the machinery at the end of an escalator. I happened to be riding up behind him and he (about age 5) was riding up behind his parents.
As the thing pulled his shoe & foot sideways, he fell and was laying across the last step. I had a hard time getting past him without tripping myself. I jumped over him, and rounded the end to find the stop button. By the time I’d gotten to it, the thing had grabbed a corner of his T-shirt & started pulling that it too. Meanwhile he was starting to get friction burns from the steps sliding under him.
The parents had just turned around and begun to understand that maybe something was wrong when I stopped the machine. And by then the person behind me had tripped over the kid too and was sprawled on the exit platform. Talking to the parents later they said they had exactly zero idea what to do to stop an escalator. And they seemed to be ordinary middle class suburban 'Merkins.
Bottom line: An escalator or moving sidewalk seems pretty slow-moving and benign. They are, until something goes wrong. Once something does go wrong, especially if it’s crowded, injuries pile-up very, very quickly.
As always, xkcd has an entry on-point: xkcd: Chin-Up Bar
I had the sole of a pretty substantial hiking style boot completely split by an airport escalator (can’t remember the airport (in the US)). It was up near the toes. I had my shoes tight against the riser of the next step and the shoe “sucked in” near the top of the escalator as the step came down… by the time I realized what was happening there was a “pop” as the rubber sole split cross-wise near the toes. Luckily no damage to my foot, just had a floppy shoe for the rest of my travels that day.
