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Human error blamed for mall escalator fall, killing mom who pushed son to safety over last moment
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HUMAN error is to blame for the horrifying escalator accident in a shopping mall, which killed a 30-year-old female shopper, Sunday in Jingzhou city, middle China's Hubei Province, local safe production watchdog said in a news conference Monday evening.
Five minutes before the accident, the mall staff discovered that a shaft cover on the end of the ascending escalator was loose but no emergency efforts such as stopping the facility were taken, said Chen Guanxin, director of the watchdog at the news conference.
The mistakes had caused the woman, unaware of the situation, to fall underneath the mechanism and landed in a gap inside and finally got killed, the official said.
It was not untill the woman was already halfway on the escalator with her son when she got a warning from some staffers waiting on the upper floor but the effort still failed to prevent the fatal fall, according to a security camera footage posted online.
Fire fighters spent four hours cutting open the facility at the Anliang department store to set free the woman. But she was already dead when her body was pulled out.
The victim, Liang Liujuan, was a full-time mom.
The seconds-long security camera footage showed the victim was holding her son in front of her as they went up the stairway, being the only passengers on the ascending escalator when the accident took place around 10am on Sunday. Several female mall attendants were waiting on the end of the escalator as they approached the upper floor.
The mother then lifted up her son and pushed him forward as a nearby shop assistant dragged him to safety. Nearly at the same moment, the panel she stepped on collapsed. The woman's lower body was immediately stuck by the running escalator. The escalator continued rolling, and several seconds later she was seen disappearing downwards into the mechanism, despite one of the staff briefly grabbing her hand.
The woman's sister-in-law, who identified herself as kkcake, said on Weibo, that the victim was shopping with her son and husband before the tragedy.
"The warning from the store attendants was already too late. It's impossible for a mom travelling with a kid to walk back on an ascending escalator," the sister-in-law said on Weibo.
The accident was one of the top topics on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo on Monday with more than 6.6 million views.
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