Here’s a riddle for you. What do you get when you cross
a large number of burly Russian soccer fans and a hideous escalator that’s seemingly been
possessed by the same malevolent spirit in that car-horror movie, Christine?
We’re not going to give you the answer just yet. First, we want you to hear what’s happened
to other people when they’ve been on the wrong end of an escalator. Maybe after,
you’ll be able to make an informed guess. Escalators don’t exactly look very nice.
They are like sets of jagged teeth that enter into an abyss and come back just as
angry. Get bitten or even swallowed by those teeth, and you are in for one hell of a ride.
But let’s start with something not teeth-related. An escalator was to blame for the 1987 King's
Cross Fire on the London Underground. What people didn’t know is an escalator in that station had
been collecting a lot of fluff and other stuff underneath it for many years. With escalators,
especially back then, things slipped down the sides and in the cracks.
We aren’t talking about a few hairs and some little bits of paper from discarded tickets
when we say things. It was later stated there were 19,400 pounds (8,800 kilograms) of waste
under the main carriage, much of it highly flammable. On top of that,
these were the old escalators with wooden steps. So, when a person dropped a match after they’d
lit up a “fag” a fire started. That turned into a deadly conflagration. Superheated gas
carried the flames, which in turn heated the many old layers of paint on the walls. The
escalator now looked like the stairway to hell. The place went up so fast it was impossible
for many people to escape. 31 people died, and 100 were injured, some very seriously.
Just so you know what it felt like for some of the survivors, one of them later said,
“A police officer was shouting: 'Get out, get out'. It was really turning panicky.” One guy
told the BBC he was in a state of shock when a fireball came hurtling towards him.
He said, “I could hardly walk and was screaming in pain, very, very loudly.”
Here’s how being burned usually goes. The flames first burn the skin,
which causes extreme pain. Then the nerves are burned through, but that’s not enough to
kill a person outright. But then their skin tightens, even enough to strangle someone.
The trauma might cause the person to pass out by this stage, especially if the fire engulfs them.
The flames damage the respiratory tract, and because a person can’t breathe, they die.
Even if they survive, they often die days after because the damage is irreversible.
Pathologists in burning cases often state the cause of death was multisystem organ failure.
Those that didn’t get eaten up by the flames died from smoke inhalation.
People don’t even have to have one small burn to die from this. According to the Nation Library
of Medicine, smoke inhalation by itself has a mortality rate of 10 percent. The fatality
rate for burns with smoke inhalation is 30 to 50 percent. It depends on certain factors, though:
how much smoke, age, and the health of the victim. The good news is if you were trapped in a tunnel
and inhaled a lot of smoke, you would fall unconscious very quickly, usually within
a few minutes. Death would also be rapid. Now for something as nightmarish as you can
imagine. It happened in 2015 in China. A woman was approaching the top of an
escalator with her child. Staff were waiting at the top, because they knew a panel after
someone steps off was loose. It seems that staff told the woman something was wrong, but had she
known just how wrong, she would have run back down the escalator with her kid in her arms.
When she got to the top, she pushed her son forward over the panel. He was home safe.
She wasn’t so lucky. As she stepped onto the panel, it opened like a gaping mouth,
swallowing her. Her entire body disappeared into the guts of the machine.
Her husband later said, “There were no warning signs at the escalator.
Nobody telling her not to step off.” The worst thing was, security footage
showed that two workers at the mall almost met with the same fate when they earlier stepped on
that dodgy panel. A better word would be trapdoor. But instead of just turning the escalator off,
it remained on for another five minutes. That was enough time for the woman and the child to get on.
The company that made the escalator was later blamed along with the mall staff.
Let’s remember it was 2015, and this was one of China’s many glitzy, ultra-modern malls.
On top of that, the Chinese media said there had been several accidents and
deaths on escalators in recent months. What do you think would happen if the
escalator you and many other people were on suddenly started going backward?
That happened in a subway station in Beijing in 2011 at 9.30 in the morning at the Beijing Zoo
Station Exit A on Line 4. One boy died, and thirty other people were injured. One of those people
described how it happened. He said, “First there was a crashing sound, then the rising escalator
started going down. Then wave after wave of people began falling. I thought I was finished.”
Another person said, “People were screaming 'help' when the escalator began to go in reverse.
It was going down very, very fast. I could barely realize what was happening before I was crushed.”
Maybe you think going backward wouldn’t be a big deal but imagine going backwards really
fast on one of those very long escalators, especially when the thing is crammed with
people. News reports didn’t say how the person died, so we can’t add much more to this story.
Another escalator accident in China around the same time involved a man losing a leg.
In another, a boy almost lost his arm. Time magazine reported there
were three gruesome accidents in one week in China in 2014 alone. That year in China,
there were 49 escalator accidents and 37 deaths. So many Chinese citizens were scared after
reading all the reports that many of them started taking some weird precautions on
escalators. However, some were in jest to make a statement about the lack of safety.
Maybe you think, ah, China, it’s not exactly a country renowned for its impeccable health
and safety standards. Such an accident, you think, wouldn’t happen in the good ole USA.
Think again. The US National Institutes
of Health says there are about 10,000 injuries on escalators in any given year in the US. Many
accidents involve old people, with more women than men. With younger people, the distribution
between men and women is pretty equal. But get this, in 50 percent of the male cases,
alcohol intoxication was involved. Impeccable health and safety standards
are no match for the unadulterated stupidity of some young American men.
In that report we could find skull fractures, hip fractures, knocked out teeth, busted up ribs,
bashed in faces, but no deaths. We could, however, find one recent
story in which a boy died after falling from an airport escalator in the US,
but the escalator was not at fault. The boy shouldn’t have been allowed to climb on the thing.
It goes without saying that if young folks grab the rail, the ride upwards
is an exhilarating experience for them. But as a warning to parents or future parents,
just remember that the fall back down can cause what the media called “major trauma to the head.”
Here’s more advice for parents. In 2017, there was a report about
a girl getting her hair stuck in an escalator in the Philippines after bending down to pick
up a toy. This caused her a lot of pain and a significant injury, but someone managed to hit
the emergency stop button just in time. The news media had one big warning for parents. Always
hold onto your kids when on an escalator. Nonetheless, adults can get trapped by
an escalator, too. As you’ll now see, that can be deadly.
In 2015, a woman was riding a subway escalator in the Canadian city of Montreal. It was winter,
and the Metro in Montreal is pure, heated bliss during those bitterly cold months.
Still, scarves can be problematic. We’ll let a policeman tell you what
happened to the woman. He said her “scarf got caught in the escalator, and then she bent down
to try to get it out and her hair got stuck, too.” The cause of death was strangulation by the scarf.
If a person is strangled, it can take maybe 10-30 seconds for them to lose consciousness. You’ll
all have seen someone who’s been choked out in an MMA fight. If the pressure keeps being applied,
it might take a person around five minutes to die. Firemen tried to resuscitate the woman,
but they were too late to the scene. After her death, people said they were
shocked that something they considered harmless could be a killer. One Montreal resident said,
“Personally, I’m really traumatized because I use that escalator every day. I will be
very careful now about any threads hanging down or shoelaces, for sure.”
Hmm, wait a minute, did she say shoelaces? No, please, not shoelaces.
Yep, shoelaces. We have an accident involving those, too.
Fortunately, no one died. The guy lost a leg, though, which is still a really bad day out.
It happened in 2015 in a mall in Mexico City. The kid didn’t realize his laces were undone,
and when he rode the escalator with his buddies, his laces got caught at the bottom as he was
getting off. He was lucky to survive. The media at the time warned people
to check their footwear before they ride escalators. Folks shouldn’t go barefoot,
either. These accidents are uncommon. It’s true that peanuts are more dangerous,
but as one escalator manufacturer said, they have enough power to pick up cars if they do catch you.
A man in Northeast Washington in the US realized that in 1997. His sweater and coat somehow got
caught at the bottom of the machine and he was strangled to death. The Washington Post said
no one knew what had happened. He may have been sitting down, or maybe he fell down,
and that’s how his clothing was caught. His estranged brother told the Post,
“This is a shocker. We don't know what to make of it.” The article said the Washington Metro was
the largest subways system in the US at the time. This was the fourth death on its many
escalators in its 21-year history. A spokesperson for escalator safety said about such accidents,
“We can only do so much. After that, common sense has to take over.”
Two previous fatalities also involved items of clothing getting caught and the victims being
strangled. In one case the drawstring of a girl’s coat caused the strangulation. In another case,
the news just said a woman’s clothes were caught. The autopsy report stated that she
was intoxicated at the time. In yet another case, a guy was electrocuted when he touched
the lights next to the escalator. Drunk accidents aren’t common,
but they have happened. In 2013, a 42- year old man “choked to death” after his clothing
was caught on an escalator in downtown Seattle. The media later said the man was seen drinking
a bottle of brandy and staggering around. He apparently fell backward when riding
the escalator. He didn’t or couldn’t get back up, so was carried down to
that vicious little part at the front. It was game over after it grabbed his shirt.
We’re not sure if all the drunk accidents happen in the US, or if other countries either don’t
report such deaths or their news reports don’t get much Google love. We found yet
another case of a drunk guy being killed on an escalator in the US. This happened in the Bronx
neighborhood of New York City in 2018. His shirt got caught, and he was dragged
down. A bystander told the press, “He was at the top. I saw the blood. His head was split open.
All you see is this guy sprawled face down.” The news reports said he’d been drinking, allegedly.
As for drunken escalator surfing, of course that happens, especially in America,
where doing daft and dangerous stuff for attention is a national sport.
In 2007, a drunk guy did that on a Las Vegas Boulevard overpass that stretched between
the MGM Grand and New York-New York. He rode the rubber wave for about four feet and then
was wiped out by eight previously imbibed tequila shots. He lost his balance and went
over onto the sidewalk, where he broke his neck. Ok, now for possibly the most macabre death today.
In 1963, an elderly woman was riding the subway in St. Petersburg Russia. We don’t know many details
because we can only find one source, but we know her shoe heel first got caught. Then she bent down
to retrieve it, but it seems the machine then snatched her hair. The report said, “Her head
became wedged between two steps of the moving stairs. She died as a result of the injuries.”
As for those soccer fans, after hearing what you’ve heard today,
what do you think happened to them? It was certainly a unique accident. The
game was a huge one, a Champions League match between CSKA Moscow and AS Roma. That meant a
lot of Moscow fans on one escalator at Rome's La Repubblica metro station. We are talking about
possibly 100 people on the escalator. The thing suddenly malfunctioned and
started going down really fast. We don’t mean twice the speed, we mean warp speed
for an escalator. Bodies started piling up at the bottom and the escalator just kept going.
Some people were crushed at the bottom and some were pushed down onto that deadly bottom part.
Amazingly, no one died, although around 24 people were injured,
some seriously. One person had to have his lower leg amputated.
You can understand the injuries were significant when you see the destruction at the bottom of
the machine. One bystander later said, “I just witnessed a scene from an apocalypse.
An escalator, one meter from me, began to accelerate as if it was going crazy.”
If that wasn’t bad enough, Roma won the game 3-0. Now you need to watch “Skinned Alive - Worst
Ways to Die.” Or, for something equally frightening, “Impalement - Worst Ways to Die.”