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The accident was recorded by a surveillance camera at the mall. Photo: SCMP Pictures

Chinese escalator horror: Mall staff 'knew footplate was broken' before mother's death

People question why shopping mall did not put up signs warning of danger after mother swallowed up while stepping onto footplate in Hubei shopping mall

Concerns over the safety of China’s public facilities swamped the internet after a malfunctioning escalator fatally swallowed a woman shopper in front of her son at a mall in Hubei on Sunday.  

Xiang Liujuan, 30, was killed when the flooring at the top of an escalator collapsed as she stepped on it. She pushed her two-year-old son to safety before being dragged into the machinery, the Wuhan Evening News said. The tragedy drew wide attention on social media.  

While many commentators were touched by the mother’s efforts to save her child, others were quick to question why the shopping mall allowed the escalator in question to operate.

Xiang’s husband, Zhang Wei, who was behind his wife and son, said all appeared normal when the mother and son boarded the escalator, Zhang’s uncle told news portal Thepaper.cn.

Emergency personnel at the Jingzhou mall investigate while shoppers crowd around. Photo: SCMP Pictures

“When they were halfway from the sixth floor to the seventh floor, two assistants at the top of the escalator started to tell them that “the footplate of the escalator is broken”, the uncle said.

Footage of the horror, caught by a surveillance camera at the Jingzhou mall, shows Xiang holding her son as she prepares to get off the escalator when a footplate collapses under her feet.

Stuck in the hole and with only her upper body above the structure, she pushes her son towards a shop assistant standing near the top of the escalator.

Xiang was dragged beneath the floor a few seconds later after another shop assistant tried to grab her arm but failed.

“Why didn’t the mall immediately shut down the escalator when they knew it had problems? Why was there no warning sign or staffer at the entrance [of the  escalator]?” a Weibo user wrote.

Zhang Wei, husband of victim Xiang Liujuan, says all appeared fine when she stepped onto the escalator. Photo: SCMP Pictures

Other commentators noted that none of the three shop assistants tried to press the emergency button to stop the escalator after Xiang was trapped.

It took rescuers nearly four hours to retrieve Xiang’s body.

Last night, the shopping mall had yet to make a formal statement about the incident. Repeated calls to the company went unanswered. An unnamed  source told the Wuhan Evening News that the incident was probably caused by workers failing to tighten footplate screws during maintenance.

Chen Guanxin, head of the Jingzhou Work Safety Administration, said last night that workers at the mall found that the escalator’s footplate had worked loose five minutes before the incident, Xinhua reported. The cause was being investigated.

Charles Wong Kai-hon, an expert on lift and escalator safety with the Vocational Training Council in Hong Kong, said the design of the escalator was questionable if it needed screws to fasten the footplate. “Using screws is not a reliable or safe design. The cover of the machine space should be held stable.  It should not be able to rotate as happened in the video,” Wong said.

Twelve people were injured last year after an escalator on the Shanghai subway suddenly reversed direction.

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