There has got to be a way to make escalators safer.
On Thursday, a toddler’s right hand was eaten up by one of the moving staircases inside the SM Marikina Mall.
A now-viral video of the incident shared by Facebook user Antonio “Tony” Romero shows the 2-year-old girl crying while sitting on the foot of the escalator as a security guard tries to keep her calm
In his caption, Romero said that the incident happened at around 4:30pm.
In a Facebook message to Coconuts Manila, Romero said that the child fell after accidentally letting go of her mother’s hand.
“[The child] accidentally let go of her mother’s hand then she tripped on the foot of the escalator and fell on her backside. When she was about to stand, she used her hand for support and placed it on the escalator,” the witness said in Filipino.
“The mother tried to go after her but she did not get the chance to.”
The child’s hand was stuck inside the escalator for about 2 minutes.
“The child was moving vigorously because of the pain,” Romero said. “The skin from her two fingers were torn off.”
Romero said that a security guard saw what happened and immediately stopped the escalator.
Because the child’s fingers were small, she was eventually able to pull her hand out herself.
According to GMA News’ 24 Oras, she was brought to the mall’s clinic before being transferred to the Quirino Memorial Medical Center.
The same report says that the child did not break any bones and has been released from the hospital.
Escalators have been around for more than a hundred years and yet freak accidents like this still happen way too often.
Who could forget that incident in October when an escalator in a Rome subway station suddenly sped up, injuring dozens of people?
In March, the top part of an escalator in Hong Kong’s Kwun Tong station broke apart after a scarf got caught in it.
There’s also that time a mother died after falling into an escalator shaft inside a mall in Central China.
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