Have you ever wondered what would happen if whilst on an escalator it changed direction or attempted to run up or down an escalator whilst it is travelling the opposite way? Well, here we have footage of some early morning commuters that quickly ended up as a human Jenga pile!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6ZSmWaHK9c
It was all caught on CCTV camera’s in East China where innocent commuters were making their ways to work and suddenly the escalator they were climbing decided that instead of going up it would, in fact, head down! People don’t always realise that any escalator can be programmed to go both upwards and downwards and that it can, in fact, change direction, however, this normally would require technicians and programming; making this situation pretty rare!
The event took place in Ningbo subway station, where travellers were headed out piling onto the escalator when suddenly you can see on the footage there was a large jolt where the mechanisms change and the escalator changed direction to go downwards at a fairly quick speed! This sent people flying and caused a domino effect as everyone fell off with a few lucky escapes being seeing jumping out of the way! It is thought that only ten people were taken to hospital for check up’s and five injured.
People soon rushed to try and help the human pile up after the shock of such a freak motion! Following the incident, the escalator has now been switched off and is being investigated into, but this is not the first case of a temperamental escalator. China actually has a pretty bad track record with 12 people being hurt in a very similar case of a sudden change of direction, another case saw 30 injuries and even one death due to the pileup and fall. This inevitably heightens the cases severity as such as an everyday piece of technology should not be expected to be so volatile, yet still people are struggling to explain the matter! These sudden reversals are pretty crazy but maybe they act as a good lesson to not be lazy and simply climb the stairs instead! After all, they are as stable as can be and all the star climbers got away without any injury at all!
