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Incredible insensitivity to risk makes mortal danger inevitable part of daily life
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MY wife was browsing messages on her WeChat account the other day, when suddenly she gasped and cried out in disbelief: “Someone’s leg is caught in an escalator, AGAIN!”
I was told the mishap happened in the Cloud Nine shopping mall in Changning District, which we used to frequent. Looking at the grisly picture she showed me, I recognized the escalator as precisely the one we habitually took. A vicarious pain throbbed in my legs.
Later that evening, we watched aghast as footage aired on the TV news showed the victim, a cleaner surnamed Zhang, being caught by a panel underfoot that burst open. His left leg was trapped in the machinery underneath.
By the time rescuers yanked him out, his left leg was already mangled beyond recognition and had to be amputated below the knee. He is only 35.
Cruel as it may sound, the maimed victim could still consider himself lucky. In a matter of five days, three people have been killed in similar accidents caused by elevator or escalator glitches.
A succession of fatalities and injuries has underscored long-standing concerns about the safety of such equipment.
During an interview with reporters, the stricken cleaner said from his hospital bed that the mall didn’t train him to follow due safety instructions, while a spokesperson for the mall countered with claims that Zhang’s “improper operation” of the escalator resulted in the tragedy. As usual, tragedy has morphed into a blame game.
Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that the accident followed hard on the heels of a “thorough” check carried out on the mall’s escalators, which apparently found nothing amiss.
Commenting on the recent spate of escalator tragedies, the Beijing-based Guang Ming Daily described them as “man-made rather than merely accidental.” The paper went on to claim that “a motley maintenance crew and lackadaisical industry supervision have riddled the otherwise safe elevator/escalator network with dangerous loopholes.”
Safety hazard
In a spot check the national quality supervision authorities conducted in the first half of this year, about 5 percent of the country’s elevators/escalators were deemed a safety hazard. Considering that this was just a spot check, the actual percentage of problematic facilities is probably much higher. After all, with the exception of Beijing, few Chinese cities have passed regulations mandating that elevators and escalators with more than 15 years in service be compulsorily retired. Many old residential buildings are equipped with poorly serviced elevators that produce ominous creaks and groans whenever activated.
Obviously the watchdogs are to blame for not doing their job well, but I have reservations about them being scapegoated for the string of mishaps.
The scope of their duties is wide and their energies are limited. Compounding the weight of their task is the fact that China has the most elevators and escalators in the world, with an estimated 3.6 million units.
A matter for all of us
While everyone is busy assigning blame, Guang Ming Daily nailed it by saying that without a sense of social responsibility and civil conscientiousness, soul-searching in the wake of tragedy is but an illusion. To take this argument even further, I believe the lessons to learn from these tragedies are intended for a larger audience than just a few possibly negligible officials or maintenance workers.
In the case of the incident in Jingzhou, Hubei Province, where a hapless young mother was crushed to death on an escalator, the saddest thing was the grotesquely muted response of bystanders to an impending tragedy.
Nobody pressed the emergency-stop button to halt the mechanism. Nor did anyone post a sign to warn of the danger ahead. Two female staff members didn’t bother to stop the victim from taking the faulty escalator with more than a few words or gestures. When the woman was sucked into the mechanism, they just stood there gawking, panicked and clueless as to what to do.
In a word, nobody realized they ought to be part of the risk prevention efforts. As the saying goes, “no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.” So risks are allowed to snowball, until they grow into an avalanche that claims lives.
In a gruesomely disconcerting way, we are reminded not only of the fecklessness of some social service providers, but also of society’s pervasive indifference to risks, or rather, a nearly criminal insensitivity to risks.
When you wade through a flooded street — a common irritant in urban China, thanks to a shoddy drainage system — you might fall into an open manhole. When you ride in an antiquated elevator, you might be sent into a deadly free fall. As I wrote these words, the terrifying idea that one day my own child’s tiny feet might be trapped in an escalator sent a chill down my spine.
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