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.”
