Looks like Gahan Wilson is alive and well.
Apparently every escalator in China is a bloodthirsty machine lying in wait for an unwary human to set foot on the landing.
This incident, in which a man fell through the landing plate and mangled his leg (badly enough to require amputation), looks awfully similar to the one on my OP.
Good OP User Name / Thread Topic combo, BTW.
Naw, total exaggeration…you can bet that any escalators used at CP headquarters or by the party elite are in perfect working order and won’t have similar issues (you can be sure of this because if they do have problems then someone else is going to die, or at a minimum wish they had).
This took some googling to figure out:
From http://stfdocs.com/films/gahan-wilson-born-dead-still-weird/
I can’t actually seem to google the cartoon itself, but the description suffices for me.
This concludes my rabbit-hole chase. We return you to your regularly scheduled thread.
Every escalator I’ve seen here has more than one emergency stop button, the buttons clearly labeled. I gripe just as much as the next person about the cavalier approach to safety here but the escalators do have the safety equipment. The fault in last week’s incident was in the maintenance people screwing up (actually, not screwing the plate down) and the store staff not turning the blame thing off.
I don’t see why it couldn’t happen in the USA or anywhere else. Lack of concern about proper maintenance or safety resulting in deaths isn’t restricted to China. I never heard about people being killed by an escalator, but sometimes an elevator/lift falls for exactly these reasons.
Unless of course American and Chinese elevators are different in their conception.
I wouldn’t have thought that such a death was possible, though. Somehow, I assumed it was impossible to fall in the machinery. Or rather I never considered that possibility.
Did you watch the video?
That woman goes from casually going up an escalator to disappeared under the floor in instants. In that amount of time, I wouldn’t be able to do anything but say “Uh… wha… Ah!!!”
You can even see it in the people. The mother instinctively moves the kid to safety. You can tell she didn’t have time to think it through. And the bystanders do what anyone does when you throw a toddler at them: they catch. By the time any human could process a rational thought, she’s already through the floor.
One of the more apparent differences between a country like U.S.A. and one like Thailand is attention to public safety. Thailand is improving but things like gaping holes in sidewalks were once common – dangers that would quickly be accompanied by warning barricades in U.S. Once I found myself driving on an unfinished overpass and had to U-turn not far from the mid-air end-of-road. :eek:
Dare I say that our litigious society has brought that beneficial state of affairs on us?
I mean, in the US, if there’s a big-ass hole in the sidewalk, or water on the floor at the grocery store, there will soon be barricades, repairs, or some poor guy with a mop to clean it up.
Why? Because if someone falls in and breaks a leg, or slips and concusses themselves, they’re likely to sue the grocery store, shop owner, city or whoever for injuries. So companies watch that stuff like hawks, because they want to limit any potential liability.
I suspect in China, if you get partially mulched in an escalator accident, your recourse as far as suing for negligence, etc… is pretty small. Here, you’d likely be able to sue way beyond your medical costs, and even if you didn’t, judges and juries might well assign punitive damages to make a point about the negligence and the need to avoid that kind of thing.
I could see why it probably would not happen in the US. We have lawyers. You would not believe the stupid things people do on escalators with their kids. And they get mad if you tell them it is dangerous. But they will get a lawyer if their kid gets hurt. I know of one case where the parents expert witness said that the blame for the kid getting hurt fell straight on the supervising adult (his uncle). The parents still got $80,000 when they should not have got a dime.
It takes one of two things for the top landing to come apart and fall in, not three. One some sort of really freak accident (and I can not see how), two the mechanic after working on the escalator not putting many screws and bolts back in (I do not see that happening), and three when an escalator is being worked on someone going around a barricade and trying to use the escalator with the top landing removed (I have seen this happen more than once, infact they got mad when I stopped them).
Depending on the age of an escalator will determine where the stop button is. Older ones it is low under the handrail. Newer ones up high near the handrail.
I was involved in one escalator accident that I told the Director of Maintenance that he had better keep the lawyers away from me. I also told him to tell his boss if the parents are asking for less than a million to pay it as fast as posasable. If they were asking for 1 to 10 million bluff they might accept less. If they were asking for more then 10 million then let it go to court. Who knows the judge may decrease the damages. If it was up to me the company would pay $100 million. I had been trying to get that escalator repaired for months only lto have them out source maintenance to an elevator escalator company. Who did nothing. A 5 YEAR OLD BOY LOST TWO TOES.
That happened to me once-- the shoe eating, I mean.
I went back and looked at the picture again. And I noticed something. On the escalators that I have worked on there is a guard plate on the upper carriage, and the picture does not show one. If the guard plate had been there when she fell through that plate would have been between her and the steps.
This time I also looked at the video. For the upper landing to fall apart in that manner some cross braces and brackets had to be missing.
To quote my former Assistant Chief Engineer “oops” is not a word you get to use when working on an escalator. Everything has to be 100% right before putting it into service. The motor on an escalator will just chew up a body and not notice it.
And in fact, checking quickly, I found several lawyers advertising about lift accidents (and mentioning lack of maintenance as a cause for suing), which means I suppose that their mere existence doesn’t prevent such accidents from happening.
Similarly, your lawyers don’t prevent wrongful death resulting from car accidents, medical mistakes, and so on. I’m sure that lawsuits are a deterrent, but it doesn’t prevent people from doing a botched job or not caring about the expenses required to strictly follow safety rules.
Precisely, I can see this kind of things happening. Poorly fixing the trap, using screw or bolts that aren’t those required, letting an essential part rust away, doing a “good enough” job that “should” hold for some time, or any number of other mistakes because of convenience, or to cut costs, or because they’re incompetent for the job, or in a hurry, or whatever.
That this exact accident would happen again in the exact same way is unlikely, it’s a freak accident reported worldwide for a reason, but IMO it could have happened elsewhere, and some other freak accident caused by a lack of adherence to safety standards will probaby happen one of these days in the USA. It might be a lift instead of an escalator, it might be an escalator collapsing because the architect messed up instead of someone falling in the machinery because the maintenance crew messed up, or whatever, but despite all your lawyers, the USA isn’t going to be free of wrongful deaths anytime soon.
[QUOTE=kaylasdad99]
I’ve never seen an escalator in China (never having visited China); I’m not prepared to assume that escalators in China have such E-stops.
[/QUOTE]
The escalator was made by Shenlong Elevator. I’d like to think an escalator with glass sides would be thoroughly modern and up to date with all possible safety features, but if emergency stop buttons aren’t required in China, then it wouldn’t surprise me if they weren’t installed.
Now to find some aspirin…translating all that Engrish was interesting. Because professional so professional indeed!
ETA: If this particular escalator has e-stop buttons, I’d expect them to be behind that trash bin or whatever it is between the two escalators. In the past, they’d be down at floor level, but on newer escalators, they’ve migrated to be more or less waist-high.
I agree lawyers don’t stop accidents. But because companies can be sued lawyers make most companies careful. An escalator properly maintained is a dangerous piece of equipment. If there is one in the building then you can bet over the years the owner’s lawyers have sat down with family lawyers more than once. Because of lawyers insurance companies require inspections. And in most states to work on an escalator or elevator requires some license. And having a license helps to make the mechanic more careful along with stopping the building owner from just hiring anyone off the street to work on the equipment.
Companies can be sued in China as well, though of course it’s not uniform that they will be or that even with mountains of evidence that they will end up paying anything. It all depends on who owns that company and their relationship to which faction of the CP they are aligned with. Companies that pollute like crazy and cause whole villages to be damaged or have ridiculously high cancer rates MIGHT be made an example of (probably not though)…but usually it’s not because of what they did, it’s more because their owner or partners or just folks they align with have fallen out of favor or backed the wrong faction. Now, the maintenance guy who caused this…he or they will most likely be made an example of if this video goes viral and if a lot of Chinese netizens are up in arms over this (as long as it’s not a reflection on the party itself of course). The company MIGHT be blamed and have to pay compensation…or, the companies backers and it’s owners might be put against a wall and shot, or taken into one of China’s mobile execution van thingies, given suspended death sentences, put in labor camps or let off Scot Free depending on internal politics. That’s the real difference.
Sure…something like this COULD happen in the US (or France or whatever). Generally, there are checks on this sort of thing, but people fuck up, people and companies cut corners, etc etc. It’s how it plays out that will be different…and the ramifications wrt future regulations and laws, and whether those are actually followed.
I think it’s like airplanes, right? Planes out of Norway are going to be safer than planes out of Chad. But freak accidents and the occasional operator error are still going to happen in Norway now and then, and even if you take Air Chad regularly you probably aren’t going to die because of it.