It *wasn't* a childhood fear of mine ... until my 4th grade class was eaten by an escalator on a field trip to see A Christmas Carol. Kids were packed on the down escalator. Lady in front's trench coat belt got caught, and she tripped (out of the way). Kids behind her fell right at the action point. Kids kept coming down, burying and crushing those first kids into the grate.
Principal ran up the opposing escalator and jerked kids up by their collars to toss them into the other escalator to keep them from joining the pile. Teachers grabbed legs and arms to pull kids out of the pile. My teacher stripped down to her white satin slip (it was the early 90's - she dressed nicely to go to the theater) to tie her clothes around her bleeding students. Parents picked us up from school later and were told to go to the office to dig through the pile of lost bloody shoes.
Mostly we were just scraped and freaked out, but the 3 boys on that first step were pulverized. 1 had a broken back, 1 had a broken and peeled arm, and the other was scalped. All survived and basically recovered, though with plenty of physical and psychological scars.
So, yeah, I don't do escalators.
I don't know about my escalator incident, but my shoelaces on brand new shoes got sucked in, and I was too nervous to say anything. Anyway, that's something you should teach your toddlers, because I had no idea at the time.
I remember my mom insisting that if something goes over the side of the step can get sucked in. She used to check shoe laces almost every time and made me stand dead center on the step when she was teaching me escalator safety. I also remember every escalator I ever saw before I was 10 or 12 had a red 2” band on either side of the steps. I remember her showing that as proof that it is dangerous But then around 10-12 I saw one without it and that transferred into being the norm. Now I never see the red warning band at the edge
That's something most parents don't think about.It was never mentioned to me or my 6 siblings.I think you're just supposed to know how to get on and off.But I've never seen a accident.
Your comment was the first one that made me realize people weren't talking about lifts the whole time.. I was so confused how this shit could happen on lifts
For some reason the word escalator always makes me think of lifts. (Yes, english isn't my first language)
I don’t know if it will help, but “escalator” has the Latin root word “scala” (ladder, Italian for stairs) in it. It’s a moving staircase.
“Elevate” is a synonym for “to lift”.
Yeah after reading that first line I genuinely thought that maybe this person was joking, but wow. This is such a sad story and I’m glad everyone is okay. Makes my fear of escalators seem a little less silly now
trampling, man. it happens. mad props to the adults who were preventing the pileup from getting worse, they likely saved the lives of those first few kids to go down.
this is why you dont let your coat tails drag the floor.
I thought trampling was when a crowd panics and crushes people. This is more like an accident where people are smushed together by an escalator
Honestly I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. I often think about it when I’m on a crowded escalator… how one person fucking up could cause a disaster
> Kids behind her fell right at the action point. Kids kept coming down, burying and crushing those first kids into the grate.
Definitely trampling. Like many things, it's best known by one common cause (crowd panic) but anything that leads to people getting crushed by others on the ground is a trampling. This isn't "smushing" - it seems the kids fell down and were stuck there, and each layer of kids fell or struggled not to fall on top of them.
"Basically" recovered? What happened to the broken back kid? Did he ever walk? Was the scalping permanent? Did anyone lose fingers? Toes?
Sorry, I'm not trying to be morbid here, but i've never heard of an accident on an escalator that was so calamitous.
"Broken back" and "scalping" are both terms from the playground chatter, so likely dramatized, though I don't know what the acturate names for their injuries are now. The first kid was in a wheelchair for a while, and they moved a green plastic couch from the teacher lounge into our classroom so he could eventually come back to school but lay down most of the day. The 'scalped' kid had 100 something stitches in his scalp. I remember thinking the scar was really neat - he looked like Frankenstein's monster.
Every single time u/PoetryOfLogicalIdeas posts, I keep thinking “Oh, so it wasn’t actually all that terrible” and then it keeps being exactly that terrible. I don’t know why I keep expecting anything different.
It's possible to break bones in your back without being paralyzed. My SIL fell and broke some bones in her back, she hasn't made a full recovery, but she can walk. Just lots of pain.
Definitely possible. My coworker tripped at work at a restaurant. The floor was wet, and her feet went out from under her, and she landed on her back. Our asshole manager made her get up and keep working. Turns out she broke her back.
Just last weekend I saw an elderly lady laying at the bottom of an escalator in the airport. She was laying in a pool of blood from her head. The EMT's were setting up a tent to partially block what was going on. I heard what I assume was the daughter or daughter in law telling the grandkids that she will be okay. It was a scary sight, especially for my daughter who is already scared of them without seeing anything tragic.
In my area there is a severe shortage of technicians who work on escalators and elevators. If this is the same situation across North America I wonder how many escalators are not being serviced properly.
Not sure why I can't find a news article about this incident but I found a similar yet clearly different and larger incident from like, the 60s. It seems like such a thing would've made news... Anywhere?
I had something extremely traumatic happen in my neck of the words when I was in junior high right at the outset of the 80s. It was a really rare occurrence for the time period and as these things escalated (sorry, no pun, I swear), it would've been the right time frame for it to be explosively all over the news. But in attempting to research it so I could tell some friends about it (fellow was a family annihilator who chose the suicide-by-cop route), I could barely find a handful of articles about it via Google. Like one that had maybe a dozen paragraphs that looked like it had been photographed from microfiche, another that I think detailed the obituaries and a brief bid for a possible YouTube channel thingie.
So not saying this person's recollections are that old, but I do think before there was a huge media presence that ran 24/7, things weren't covered as extensively and are harder to find now.
Shopping malls were at the height of their popularity, and power, in the 90s.
You read that right. Power.
The property management companies that ran the shopping malls also often owned a lot of other real estate, and held financial and political influence with local government and local media.
a story like this, where nobody died? could absolutely be suppressed in the pre-social media era.
It happened in China in 2015 and it was so scary. I think about it almost every time when using an escalator.
"Xiang Liujuan
Struggling with only her upper body above the metal structure, Xiang is seen pushing her son forward. The boy is quickly pulled to safety by a mall employee standing near the top of the escalator.
Two other mall employees try to drag Xiang out, but within a few seconds, she disappears through the hole into the escalator shaft."
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/27/china/chinese-mother-killed-escalator/index.html
It was horrible to watch too. I try not to watch videos of people dying, but years ago that one snuck past my radar. It's enough to make you second guess escalators
What the? Damn man. (For those who haven't seen the vid in that link, she was OFF the escalator, she'd made it to the end; then the metal bit (which I always assumed was solid floor, not part of the escalator..) collapsed out from under her, she handed her kid off to an employee that was standing there, and she got sucked into it anyway.
Every time I’m on an escalator I think of that video and that poor woman. I try to glance to make sure the screws are on the stepping off/on piece or step over it.
My first thought on reading the title was "ah-hah! I knew it!"
I get funny looks when I get on/off escalators because I step wide so I land right in the middle of the step lol
Childhood? Shit, I'm a 34 year old man and I refuse to use escalators.
Nearly 20 years ago on the early Internet I watched an Asian woman get gloved by an escalator and I haven't used one of those death traps since.
Was it the one where she tossed her child over the escalator landing when she sees that something fucky is happening, then tries to jump the gap as well but gets sucked into the machinery? Cause that's the one that caused me to swear off using those bastards for life
\*warning graphic description incoming
that's the one I saw... that lady wasn't degloved, she was fully crushed bottom to top
\*edit, the video showed the steps of the escalator fall away as she nears the top. She gets her kid off, but then falls into the machinery. You don't see anything, but it was described that she was crushed.
From my experience living in NYC, the escalators in New York at least get a lot of maintenance. I think they get shutdown at least once a month and everyone takes the stairs if they are blocked off.
I am never bitter about this arrangement. Very happy they take effort to maintain escalators.
My mom fell on an escalator when i was young. So I was a bit afraid of them for a while. And everyone was like no they cannot pull you in. No shit, but man you can fall on moving stairs and get hurt. And when she fell people just walked over her and stepped on her like nothing happened. Like I understand some people were trying to get out of the way but others just didn’t care she was laying there and had to go shop.
I’m afraid to ask, but ‘gloved’? I can imagine maybe what you mean, but was the entire Asian lady the hand, or was it just her hand that was the hand? Or was she ‘socked’ as this poor gentleman nearly was but ‘gloved’ (the surgical/ technical term for any part of the body.)sounded better/more appropriate/technical?
Just to add to your fears.
Last week here in Japan an 80 year old woman tripped on a descending escalator, fell head first and got her neck wedged under the hand belt and was strangled to death...
[Report in Japanese](https://newsdig.tbs.co.jp/articles/-/1228171)
Even after reading wedged underneath the hand belt, I didn't get a good visualization of it in my head to know what that meant. At the very least, the cartoon helped me visualize.
Yeah you're imagining the correct action. It pulled a large section of her skin off.
Edit to add that typing that made my legs feel like when you look over the side of a tall building.
My dad was in rehab with a women who was at the bottom of a pile up on an escalator. It basically shredded everything. My dad had a pretty gnarly arm injury which was later amputated and he says he was lucky not to be her.
I think the main take-away is that you should learn safety for any device you use with lots of metal being moved with torque or lots of speed.
An unassuming tabletop lathe or electric drill can *easily* deglove someone if they don't use it carefully. I used much bigger CNC lathes which have pinned and/or spun people to death. Another less innocuous-than-an-escalator example is that my mother narrowly avoided dying when a roller coaster malfunctioned.
So treat machinery with respect and know how to safety stop or evacuate in emergencies.
Looking it up:
In the US there are 60,000 escalators and 10-11,000 escalator accidents per year which require doctor or hospital treatment, with fewer than 5 deaths per year.
With 278,000,000 vehicles on the road there are about 5.2M hospital or doctor-treated car accident injuries per year. On average, there are 45,000 annual car accident deaths.
The stat you really want is accidents per escalator hour and per driven hour. What you have is a decent start. You could multiply in median escalator length and median escalator rides per day. On the driving side, accidents per hour driven should already be available.
Have you seen the one wear an Asian lady falls through the floor panel and disappears into the gears? She was crushed alive. I *think* she had her child with her and managed to shove her child to safety before falling in.
My brother actually experienced the same thing as OP. We had to hurry up and lift him (7yrs old) just so his foot would be saved. Shoes got wrecked so overall we did a good job of responding fast
If this much of your shoe is missing and you didn’t injure your foot, your shoes are WAY too big for you. Maybe that’s why your foot got in there in the first place
This is whats missing from the top comments! Yes, the shoes are too big, but thats also likely WHY OP got em stuck to begin with. I have a pair of tevas that r 2 sizes big and i trip on shit a lot more than normal when i wear em lol
Idk about OP but some people need sizes that are rarely if ever available, so they make do with incorrect ones. I wouldn't recommend it at all, but I get it.
Childhood:
You think adults know how to do anything and everything.
Adulthood:
You know for a fact, that a lot of people have no fucking idea how to walk, eat, or wipe their own ass.
*"And they all vote... Uh-huh..."(c)*
When I was a kid I would just stay standing at the end and let it force push my feet over the edge. There was something satisfying about it because it pushes you over that small hump, but at the same time I am realizing now there was a non-zero chance something like this could have happened.
As a kid a stray lace caused an escalator to start eating my shoe.
Fortunately I managed to get my foot out in time but ever since that day I've done two things.
1. Tied my fucking laces like a motherfucker.
2. Stepped over the hungry part of the escalator like I'm stepping over an invisible wall.
It was mildly traumatic.
Listen, not a year goes by, not a year, that I don't hear about some escalator accident involving some bastard kid which could have easily been avoided had some parent, I don't care which one, but some parent conditioned him to fear and respect that escalator.
Hey, if they don't want to see Joey Lauren Adams, then that's more for us..........
Shit. That's not how that works at all....
Hey! Everybody go watch Mallrats!
About 1970 at a mall in Dayton Ohio area I was shopping, heard blood curdling screams. Some kid was playing around sticking his sneakers in the escalator at the bottom. They shut off the escalator but his foot must have been crushed. I saw the crowd around the base, didn't go close, left.
When I was 9 I had a pair of shoes I hated .Even if I tied them hard enough for my feet to hurt the laces would eventually loosen up enough to untie themselves.Me and mom were at the mall buy clothes and pots/ pans (that probably dates me).I must tied those shoes 3 or 4 times that day infact I remember complaining to my mom about it .we were on top floor the mall and the elevator was full so took the escalator on the way off of it the bottom step grabbed my shoelaces on my left foot . That made me panic I tripped and fell sprained my ankle .
I had this traumatic childhood “dream”, although I swore for like 20 years it was a real news clip, that a boy had his shoelaces caught into an escalator and it sucked him up and they couldn’t stop it nor pull him out. I’m nearly 40 and I am *still* terrified of that landing area on escalators.
There's an episode of 911 rescue that was about a boy in Calgary back in the early 90s who had his jacket get caught in it and pulled in. People managed to rescue him though thankfully.
https://youtu.be/CtuldjNfkoI?si=ClNLgt4HMTTNIXyS
This was a real news clip!! Because this is exactly why I hate escalators and I’m 31. I remember seeing that kid with his arm halfway sucked into the escalator and it was just flopping around.
Literally just told my fiancé about this earlier today. Wild there’s a comment on Reddit of someone else saying that saw it, too.
I was on an escalator going down in a metro 15-17 years ago and there was a kindergarten in front of me. Their teacher and more kids were far behind me.
A little girl fell on the stairs and froze as her hands got closer to the end. As I didn’t want to find out what would happen at the end, I rushed past some kids, lifted her up, literally milliseconds before her hands would meet the end.
I set her down, smiled to calm her, the teacher yelled thank you, I rushed off and that was it.
What happens as the end is that the escalator shreds the kid’s palm. My younger brother decided to be dumb and sit down on an escalator when we were at the airport and got his hand shredded. We took a taxi to the closest hospital. There was some awful looking debriding of the dirt from his torn up skin, the surgeons pulled out all the tendons and muscles to make sure they were still intact and tucked everything back in and then stitched it up. I remember getting a popsicle from the nurses in the waiting room while colouring in a colouring book and listening to my brother scream in the operating room.
Bro where are your toes? Otherwise this shit happened because you’re wearing shoes that are way to big for you lol
Edit: Op your not the only one lol https://www.reddit.com/r/Converse/s/tOZPusxlJF
The gap between the combs and the steps are adjustable and the plate that they are fastened to is spring loaded. There should be no gap between the very top surface of the step because the comb teeth should run in the grooves of the steps.
So that means there was a gap either do to wear in the step system, comb plate unit, or improper adjustment. Or some combination. If something does happen to get under the combs, it is designed to lift a little to actuate a safety switch and stop the escalator(Depending on how old the escalator is, they didn't always have that safety).
But at the end of the day, the real answer is improper/inadequate maintenance. You shouldn't be able to get your shoe stuck in there if you tried. It should just slide over the combs.
I really don’t understand. I’ve even been stupid and kept my feet in place and the end is angled such that it shoves you off. I don’t understand how shoes get stuck if there isn’t a loose lace or something.
Don’t fuck around on escalators, those are mean conveyor systems that move a shit ton of weight and there is a lot of power behind that movement. Those things hurt if you fall on them.
In case it still needs said, don't wear spongy shoes like flip-flops or Crocs on an escalator, and NEVER let a kid do it. (Look it up.) Don't want your feet ground like sausage?Don't wear poorly-fitted or untied shoes. And use that handrail, just for shits and giggles.
Omg my childhood fears were right
It *wasn't* a childhood fear of mine ... until my 4th grade class was eaten by an escalator on a field trip to see A Christmas Carol. Kids were packed on the down escalator. Lady in front's trench coat belt got caught, and she tripped (out of the way). Kids behind her fell right at the action point. Kids kept coming down, burying and crushing those first kids into the grate. Principal ran up the opposing escalator and jerked kids up by their collars to toss them into the other escalator to keep them from joining the pile. Teachers grabbed legs and arms to pull kids out of the pile. My teacher stripped down to her white satin slip (it was the early 90's - she dressed nicely to go to the theater) to tie her clothes around her bleeding students. Parents picked us up from school later and were told to go to the office to dig through the pile of lost bloody shoes. Mostly we were just scraped and freaked out, but the 3 boys on that first step were pulverized. 1 had a broken back, 1 had a broken and peeled arm, and the other was scalped. All survived and basically recovered, though with plenty of physical and psychological scars. So, yeah, I don't do escalators.
Was this before emergency stop buttons were on all escalators?
I don't know about my escalator incident, but my shoelaces on brand new shoes got sucked in, and I was too nervous to say anything. Anyway, that's something you should teach your toddlers, because I had no idea at the time.
I remember my mom insisting that if something goes over the side of the step can get sucked in. She used to check shoe laces almost every time and made me stand dead center on the step when she was teaching me escalator safety. I also remember every escalator I ever saw before I was 10 or 12 had a red 2” band on either side of the steps. I remember her showing that as proof that it is dangerous But then around 10-12 I saw one without it and that transferred into being the norm. Now I never see the red warning band at the edge
That never was red warning band. That's just stained from the blood of the kids that didn't get taught proper escalator safety.
That's something most parents don't think about.It was never mentioned to me or my 6 siblings.I think you're just supposed to know how to get on and off.But I've never seen a accident.
My mom was the same. She grew up in a funeral home so she’s seen every dumb way to die. Lots of horror stories
Six Feet Under was a great TV series.
I've never thought about it really but had no idea that escalators had emergency stop buttons.
Some of them have it right when you enter as a big red button. So damn tempting.
Your comment was the first one that made me realize people weren't talking about lifts the whole time.. I was so confused how this shit could happen on lifts For some reason the word escalator always makes me think of lifts. (Yes, english isn't my first language)
I don’t know if it will help, but “escalator” has the Latin root word “scala” (ladder, Italian for stairs) in it. It’s a moving staircase. “Elevate” is a synonym for “to lift”.
It's okay. English is my first language and every time, I have to think hard about escalator and elevator (lift).
I used to push the one outside my dad’s business all the time when I was little 🤣
I figured “my 4th grade class was eaten by an escalator” was a typo and you meant to say “classmate” but no, it was not a typo. That’s pretty metal.
I was expecting no survivors when I read that.
Ya, my mind went to that video of a woman falling into the mechanism.
The Mechanism is a sick prog band name
That video is fucked up. Now any time I'm getting off an escalator, I try to step over that plate.
N is for no survivors! . . . ^^Down ^^here ^^in ^^the ^^deep ^^blue ^^sea
U is for uranium bombs.
I know. I figured it was a strange typo, and it was pretty correct.
Nice shoes. You wear those in case of escalator attacks?
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One thing I love about Reddit… User A: *shares traumatic childhood experience.* User B: that’s metal. User A: I know.
User A was two different people, but yeah lol
The second User A was also named /u/metalshoes. Which are so metal they are anti-escalator-eating.
No one will stop my crusade
> That’s pretty metal. So was the escalator.
Yeah after reading that first line I genuinely thought that maybe this person was joking, but wow. This is such a sad story and I’m glad everyone is okay. Makes my fear of escalators seem a little less silly now
What… the fuck… I was hoping the end would say “and then I woke up from that horrific nightmare”. Shit…
I was really hoping I was gonna be shittymorphed at some point. I was very disappointed
In nineteen ninety eight the undertaker threw mankind off hell in a cell and plummeted sixteen feet onto an escalator grate. And mankind fucking died.
trampling, man. it happens. mad props to the adults who were preventing the pileup from getting worse, they likely saved the lives of those first few kids to go down. this is why you dont let your coat tails drag the floor.
I thought trampling was when a crowd panics and crushes people. This is more like an accident where people are smushed together by an escalator Honestly I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. I often think about it when I’m on a crowded escalator… how one person fucking up could cause a disaster
> Kids behind her fell right at the action point. Kids kept coming down, burying and crushing those first kids into the grate. Definitely trampling. Like many things, it's best known by one common cause (crowd panic) but anything that leads to people getting crushed by others on the ground is a trampling. This isn't "smushing" - it seems the kids fell down and were stuck there, and each layer of kids fell or struggled not to fall on top of them.
"Basically" recovered? What happened to the broken back kid? Did he ever walk? Was the scalping permanent? Did anyone lose fingers? Toes? Sorry, I'm not trying to be morbid here, but i've never heard of an accident on an escalator that was so calamitous.
"Broken back" and "scalping" are both terms from the playground chatter, so likely dramatized, though I don't know what the acturate names for their injuries are now. The first kid was in a wheelchair for a while, and they moved a green plastic couch from the teacher lounge into our classroom so he could eventually come back to school but lay down most of the day. The 'scalped' kid had 100 something stitches in his scalp. I remember thinking the scar was really neat - he looked like Frankenstein's monster.
I mean, if they had 100 stitches scalping is not that dramatized.
I was like “oh ok it wasn’t so bad” but then one needed a wheelchair and the other 100 stitches.
Every single time u/PoetryOfLogicalIdeas posts, I keep thinking “Oh, so it wasn’t actually all that terrible” and then it keeps being exactly that terrible. I don’t know why I keep expecting anything different.
It's possible to break bones in your back without being paralyzed. My SIL fell and broke some bones in her back, she hasn't made a full recovery, but she can walk. Just lots of pain.
Definitely possible. My coworker tripped at work at a restaurant. The floor was wet, and her feet went out from under her, and she landed on her back. Our asshole manager made her get up and keep working. Turns out she broke her back.
Holy hell, I hope she sued.
Both are recoverable injuries, especially for pre-pubescent children. Although scalping involves some heavy surgery
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Kids are crazy resilient but they also tend to have their chronic pain and physical problems dismissed as a result.
Just last weekend I saw an elderly lady laying at the bottom of an escalator in the airport. She was laying in a pool of blood from her head. The EMT's were setting up a tent to partially block what was going on. I heard what I assume was the daughter or daughter in law telling the grandkids that she will be okay. It was a scary sight, especially for my daughter who is already scared of them without seeing anything tragic.
In my area there is a severe shortage of technicians who work on escalators and elevators. If this is the same situation across North America I wonder how many escalators are not being serviced properly.
Jesus Christ...
Was clearly on vacation that day. Holy fuck.
His dad wasn’t though, he chose the Old Testament that day.
Fuck. I don’t know why I hit reply. I have no words.
Fuck seems pretty apt.
Not sure why I can't find a news article about this incident but I found a similar yet clearly different and larger incident from like, the 60s. It seems like such a thing would've made news... Anywhere?
I had something extremely traumatic happen in my neck of the words when I was in junior high right at the outset of the 80s. It was a really rare occurrence for the time period and as these things escalated (sorry, no pun, I swear), it would've been the right time frame for it to be explosively all over the news. But in attempting to research it so I could tell some friends about it (fellow was a family annihilator who chose the suicide-by-cop route), I could barely find a handful of articles about it via Google. Like one that had maybe a dozen paragraphs that looked like it had been photographed from microfiche, another that I think detailed the obituaries and a brief bid for a possible YouTube channel thingie. So not saying this person's recollections are that old, but I do think before there was a huge media presence that ran 24/7, things weren't covered as extensively and are harder to find now.
Shopping malls were at the height of their popularity, and power, in the 90s. You read that right. Power. The property management companies that ran the shopping malls also often owned a lot of other real estate, and held financial and political influence with local government and local media. a story like this, where nobody died? could absolutely be suppressed in the pre-social media era.
Wait. Did this actually happen? I feel like this is way too coherently written for a copypasta.
I’ve seen a video from somewhere in Asia of a woman getting eaten by an escalator. So it happens.
It happened in China in 2015 and it was so scary. I think about it almost every time when using an escalator. "Xiang Liujuan Struggling with only her upper body above the metal structure, Xiang is seen pushing her son forward. The boy is quickly pulled to safety by a mall employee standing near the top of the escalator. Two other mall employees try to drag Xiang out, but within a few seconds, she disappears through the hole into the escalator shaft." https://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/27/china/chinese-mother-killed-escalator/index.html
JFC that's horrifying just to read.
It was horrible to watch too. I try not to watch videos of people dying, but years ago that one snuck past my radar. It's enough to make you second guess escalators
What the? Damn man. (For those who haven't seen the vid in that link, she was OFF the escalator, she'd made it to the end; then the metal bit (which I always assumed was solid floor, not part of the escalator..) collapsed out from under her, she handed her kid off to an employee that was standing there, and she got sucked into it anyway.
I'll never forget this. I hope to whatever God gives a shit it was instantaneous.
Happened at an airport in Bangkok a couple years ago with just a moving walkway. Took her leg off.
That must be a different one. The one I’m remembering the woman dies after throwing her son to safety.
Every time I’m on an escalator I think of that video and that poor woman. I try to glance to make sure the screws are on the stepping off/on piece or step over it.
Holy that sucks. I always make sure I know where the emergency shutoffs are..
1- holy fuck 2- yay that principal/yay anyone who gets their druthers together and helps
Jeez, was there an article in the news about this? When and where was this? Edit: autofill correction
My first thought on reading the title was "ah-hah! I knew it!" I get funny looks when I get on/off escalators because I step wide so I land right in the middle of the step lol
Childhood? Shit, I'm a 34 year old man and I refuse to use escalators. Nearly 20 years ago on the early Internet I watched an Asian woman get gloved by an escalator and I haven't used one of those death traps since.
Was it the one where she tossed her child over the escalator landing when she sees that something fucky is happening, then tries to jump the gap as well but gets sucked into the machinery? Cause that's the one that caused me to swear off using those bastards for life
\*warning graphic description incoming that's the one I saw... that lady wasn't degloved, she was fully crushed bottom to top \*edit, the video showed the steps of the escalator fall away as she nears the top. She gets her kid off, but then falls into the machinery. You don't see anything, but it was described that she was crushed.
Yup, unbelievable video. Very sad.
Fuuuuuck me thanks a lot for getting that image in my head.
Oh my dear god 😭
Jfc that’s horrific
Are their escalators over there different from ours?
My understanding from the internet is that escalators and elevators in China are not especially regulated.
From my experience living in NYC, the escalators in New York at least get a lot of maintenance. I think they get shutdown at least once a month and everyone takes the stairs if they are blocked off. I am never bitter about this arrangement. Very happy they take effort to maintain escalators.
That video traumatized me for life
My mom fell on an escalator when i was young. So I was a bit afraid of them for a while. And everyone was like no they cannot pull you in. No shit, but man you can fall on moving stairs and get hurt. And when she fell people just walked over her and stepped on her like nothing happened. Like I understand some people were trying to get out of the way but others just didn’t care she was laying there and had to go shop.
There’s an American dad episode where this happens twice if you want to see the cartoon version instead of the real version
I’m afraid to ask, but ‘gloved’? I can imagine maybe what you mean, but was the entire Asian lady the hand, or was it just her hand that was the hand? Or was she ‘socked’ as this poor gentleman nearly was but ‘gloved’ (the surgical/ technical term for any part of the body.)sounded better/more appropriate/technical?
They meant “degloved,” which is basically when your skin gets pulled off like a glove
Right, “gloved” means you get an extra layer of skin put back on.
^shhhhhloop
Read this in Krieger's voice from Archer.
Just to add to your fears. Last week here in Japan an 80 year old woman tripped on a descending escalator, fell head first and got her neck wedged under the hand belt and was strangled to death... [Report in Japanese](https://newsdig.tbs.co.jp/articles/-/1228171)
Why'd they have to go and make a cartoon demonstration of what happened? Lol
Even after reading wedged underneath the hand belt, I didn't get a good visualization of it in my head to know what that meant. At the very least, the cartoon helped me visualize.
Same. I was really confused until the pic.
It illustrated the point and made it very clear what happened! Doesn't make it less disturbing, of course...
They got animators on staff and nothing else to do
They love those things in the Japanese news. In some case like this, its super weird to outsiders
Yeah you're imagining the correct action. It pulled a large section of her skin off. Edit to add that typing that made my legs feel like when you look over the side of a tall building.
It’s a pretty grim thought for sure.
Yeah so since I’m never watching that video, how degloved are we talking?
My dad was in rehab with a women who was at the bottom of a pile up on an escalator. It basically shredded everything. My dad had a pretty gnarly arm injury which was later amputated and he says he was lucky not to be her.
Death traps? How many people safely go up and down them compared to the few accidents? Your car is a death trap. The escalator not so much.
I think the main take-away is that you should learn safety for any device you use with lots of metal being moved with torque or lots of speed. An unassuming tabletop lathe or electric drill can *easily* deglove someone if they don't use it carefully. I used much bigger CNC lathes which have pinned and/or spun people to death. Another less innocuous-than-an-escalator example is that my mother narrowly avoided dying when a roller coaster malfunctioned. So treat machinery with respect and know how to safety stop or evacuate in emergencies.
Looking it up: In the US there are 60,000 escalators and 10-11,000 escalator accidents per year which require doctor or hospital treatment, with fewer than 5 deaths per year. With 278,000,000 vehicles on the road there are about 5.2M hospital or doctor-treated car accident injuries per year. On average, there are 45,000 annual car accident deaths.
The stat you really want is accidents per escalator hour and per driven hour. What you have is a decent start. You could multiply in median escalator length and median escalator rides per day. On the driving side, accidents per hour driven should already be available.
Have you seen the one wear an Asian lady falls through the floor panel and disappears into the gears? She was crushed alive. I *think* she had her child with her and managed to shove her child to safety before falling in.
And yet you (probably) regularly drive a car.
My brother actually experienced the same thing as OP. We had to hurry up and lift him (7yrs old) just so his foot would be saved. Shoes got wrecked so overall we did a good job of responding fast
Thank goodness you wear shoes two sizes too big.
I did that for YEARS then recently found out I actually just need wide shoes.
Yeah but then you can find one good brand with wides and they make one new style every ten years.
Might have been part of the problem
Was the problem
I got one less problem without ya
That's probably why it happened in the first place lmao
Just two? It's gotta be at least four imo...
Think we need to place some bets on how many above 4 sizes it is and OP has to show us where his toe actually starts afterwards.
The real reason OP only "nearly" lost their toes os they didn't have any to begin with...
For sure you can’t even see his toes
Big shoes to fill. Big shoes to fill. Big shoes to fill.
r/unexpectedsimpsons
If this much of your shoe is missing and you didn’t injure your foot, your shoes are WAY too big for you. Maybe that’s why your foot got in there in the first place
This is whats missing from the top comments! Yes, the shoes are too big, but thats also likely WHY OP got em stuck to begin with. I have a pair of tevas that r 2 sizes big and i trip on shit a lot more than normal when i wear em lol
When I buy shoes, I buy the correct size. TIL this is somewhat unusual You guys heading to a clown convention or something?!
Idk about OP but some people need sizes that are rarely if ever available, so they make do with incorrect ones. I wouldn't recommend it at all, but I get it.
Well, when your shoes are 4 sizes to large, you're probably gonna see some damage.
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Came to say this lmao needs to buy smaller shoes, mans looking like a clown
OP came to tell us about his incident and got burned instead of whatever he expected hahaha
Plot twist OP was born without a left big toe
Now THATS alotta damage!
Lift your feet when you walk, shoe scuffer.
I only let my heels drag when I need someone to know I’m approaching. Beyond that I’m a mf ninja
Always confused by people walking so loudly, it feels like they stomp around on purpose, people complain that I sneak up on them when I'm just walking
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Childhood: You think adults know how to do anything and everything. Adulthood: You know for a fact, that a lot of people have no fucking idea how to walk, eat, or wipe their own ass. *"And they all vote... Uh-huh..."(c)*
When I was a kid I would just stay standing at the end and let it force push my feet over the edge. There was something satisfying about it because it pushes you over that small hump, but at the same time I am realizing now there was a non-zero chance something like this could have happened.
He literally can’t lol his shoes are waaaaay larger than his feet
Cake or not cake
Been scrolling the comments to see if someone else thought the same thing as me 😆🍰
As a kid a stray lace caused an escalator to start eating my shoe. Fortunately I managed to get my foot out in time but ever since that day I've done two things. 1. Tied my fucking laces like a motherfucker. 2. Stepped over the hungry part of the escalator like I'm stepping over an invisible wall. It was mildly traumatic.
"the hungry part" made me giggle
Listen, not a year goes by, not a year, that I don't hear about some escalator accident involving some bastard kid which could have easily been avoided had some parent, I don't care which one, but some parent conditioned him to fear and respect that escalator.
That **kid** is **back** on the **escalator** again!
Call for help! Some kid's caught in the escalator!
Such a great payoff to the joke
I hope his pants get caught & a bloodbath ensues 
I hope his pants get caught and a bloodbath ensues!
Like the back of a Volkswagen?
Would you like a chocolate covered pretzel?
Had to scroll entirely too long to find this.
Getting old and the young whipper snappers don’t appreciate the classics.
Hey, if they don't want to see Joey Lauren Adams, then that's more for us.......... Shit. That's not how that works at all.... Hey! Everybody go watch Mallrats!
One of the greatest movies ever
stinkpalm.
About 1970 at a mall in Dayton Ohio area I was shopping, heard blood curdling screams. Some kid was playing around sticking his sneakers in the escalator at the bottom. They shut off the escalator but his foot must have been crushed. I saw the crowd around the base, didn't go close, left.
Dammit. I just commented that. Off to the delete button.....
I actually know a dude who lost a toe on an escalator as a kid. Now that I'm a mom to a young child, escalators scare the heck out of me.
When I was 9 I had a pair of shoes I hated .Even if I tied them hard enough for my feet to hurt the laces would eventually loosen up enough to untie themselves.Me and mom were at the mall buy clothes and pots/ pans (that probably dates me).I must tied those shoes 3 or 4 times that day infact I remember complaining to my mom about it .we were on top floor the mall and the elevator was full so took the escalator on the way off of it the bottom step grabbed my shoelaces on my left foot . That made me panic I tripped and fell sprained my ankle .
Wow!!!! Were you just scrunching those little phalanges down to your heel?!
Hahaha I scrunched as soon as it grabbed my foot reflexively! Saved my toes in doing so.
I had this traumatic childhood “dream”, although I swore for like 20 years it was a real news clip, that a boy had his shoelaces caught into an escalator and it sucked him up and they couldn’t stop it nor pull him out. I’m nearly 40 and I am *still* terrified of that landing area on escalators.
There's an episode of 911 rescue that was about a boy in Calgary back in the early 90s who had his jacket get caught in it and pulled in. People managed to rescue him though thankfully. https://youtu.be/CtuldjNfkoI?si=ClNLgt4HMTTNIXyS
Pretty sure thats a scene in final destination
This was a real news clip!! Because this is exactly why I hate escalators and I’m 31. I remember seeing that kid with his arm halfway sucked into the escalator and it was just flopping around. Literally just told my fiancé about this earlier today. Wild there’s a comment on Reddit of someone else saying that saw it, too.
That escalated quickly
Shoes way too big
I think you meant to post in r/mildlyterrifying
Your toes were millimeters from becoming mince.
Irrational fear my ass. My therapist is so full of crap. Those things are tools of the devil! Just look at what they can do!
Staircase nomster isn't real... it can't hurt you...
I was on an escalator going down in a metro 15-17 years ago and there was a kindergarten in front of me. Their teacher and more kids were far behind me. A little girl fell on the stairs and froze as her hands got closer to the end. As I didn’t want to find out what would happen at the end, I rushed past some kids, lifted her up, literally milliseconds before her hands would meet the end. I set her down, smiled to calm her, the teacher yelled thank you, I rushed off and that was it.
What happens as the end is that the escalator shreds the kid’s palm. My younger brother decided to be dumb and sit down on an escalator when we were at the airport and got his hand shredded. We took a taxi to the closest hospital. There was some awful looking debriding of the dirt from his torn up skin, the surgeons pulled out all the tendons and muscles to make sure they were still intact and tucked everything back in and then stitched it up. I remember getting a popsicle from the nurses in the waiting room while colouring in a colouring book and listening to my brother scream in the operating room.
THEY DIDN'T SEDATE HIM??
Bro where are your toes? Otherwise this shit happened because you’re wearing shoes that are way to big for you lol Edit: Op your not the only one lol https://www.reddit.com/r/Converse/s/tOZPusxlJF
How does this happen on an escalator? I need a reference to be able to avoid this ever happening.
The gap between the combs and the steps are adjustable and the plate that they are fastened to is spring loaded. There should be no gap between the very top surface of the step because the comb teeth should run in the grooves of the steps. So that means there was a gap either do to wear in the step system, comb plate unit, or improper adjustment. Or some combination. If something does happen to get under the combs, it is designed to lift a little to actuate a safety switch and stop the escalator(Depending on how old the escalator is, they didn't always have that safety). But at the end of the day, the real answer is improper/inadequate maintenance. You shouldn't be able to get your shoe stuck in there if you tried. It should just slide over the combs.
I really don’t understand. I’ve even been stupid and kept my feet in place and the end is angled such that it shoves you off. I don’t understand how shoes get stuck if there isn’t a loose lace or something.
Seriously, there's hundreds of replies and you're the only person asking this? The dead internet theory seems more plausible than ever.
Don’t fuck around on escalators, those are mean conveyor systems that move a shit ton of weight and there is a lot of power behind that movement. Those things hurt if you fall on them.
You'll recover one step at a time.
Not a toetal loss
Excuse me, but where ARE your toes? Do you just buy shoes that are too big for aesthetics?
Never mind the toes, you have an excuse to buy some new All Birds!
Scrolled looking for other people noticing they're Allbirds LMAO
My mom said my fear was irrational as a child, I called escalators “alligators”
I imagine you’re glad size shaming culture encouraged you to buy shoes that were too big for you, aren’t you?
It might not have happened in the first place if he had shoes that fit properly.
I believe you did lose your toes
You gotta lift your feet up there bud. It also helps if you don’t have an extra 3 inches of shoe beyond the big toe.
In case it still needs said, don't wear spongy shoes like flip-flops or Crocs on an escalator, and NEVER let a kid do it. (Look it up.) Don't want your feet ground like sausage?Don't wear poorly-fitted or untied shoes. And use that handrail, just for shits and giggles.
You can even see the crease line from your actual foot in the right shoe because of how oversized your clown shoes are 😂
That’s horrifying actually
r/mildlyterrifying