Shanghai Escalator Inspectors Reveal Hazard

Safety officials from the Shanghai Quality and Technical Supervision Bureau have finished inspecting 2,600 escalators from all over the city of Shanghai and have ordered 33 machines to be indefinitely suspended after being labeled hazardous by the bureau.

The inspections were performed following an alarming number of incidents all over the country where people were being seriously injured due to malfunctioning escalators. There has even been one death attributed to the faulty machines.

With 17,000 escalators currently in use and in operation in Shanghai, the number inspected and tested only makes up about 15 percent of the total. Relying on extrapolation, the bureau estimated that the actual number of "hazardous" machines comes to more than 200.

The bureau did not give a reason as to why it did not make a comprehensive appraisal of all escalators in the city.

According to Shen Weimin, deputy director of the bureau, the inspectors did not simply inspect and identify faulty machines. They also revealed that many of the ones responsible for the escalators, including manufacturing and maintenance firms, have not established appropriate response procedures in order to mitigate accidents and deal with the aftermath of an emergency.

There are also a fair amount of companies that have failed to provide training programs for management staff to properly operate machines at the venues in which they were installed, Shen added.

Suzhou Shenlong Elevator Co. was one of the offending manufacturers that the bureau ordered to dismantle seven of its machines and repair five others.

The Suzhou-based company gained a bad name last month when one of its machines took the life of a woman who saved her 2-year-old child from the machine.

The mother and son had just stepped onto the escalator at a department store in Jingzhou when a loose floor panel collapsed. The woman was able to push her son to safety, but was dragged into the mechanism, killing her.