An airline passenger in Thailand had part of her leg
amputated this past week after an accident on a moving airport walkway, Thai
authorities said.
اضافة اعلان
The accident, involving a 57-year-old woman, occurred
Thursday in the domestic terminal of Don Mueang International, the older and
smaller of two major airports that serve Bangkok, the capital.
It is unclear precisely what happened. Local news media
initially reported that the woman’s leg had been pulled into the walkway’s
machinery after she tripped on her suitcase. But her family said Saturday that
she had been walking normally when part of the walkway collapsed.
What is clear is that her leg was amputated up to the
kneecap after the accident. Thai authorities are now trying to determine if the
accident resulted from human error or equipment malfunction.
Why it matters: Walkways are widely used and seldom feared
Such walkways are known as “moving walks” to government
regulators and construction companies. Moving walks are often talked about in
the same breath as escalators because they use similar technology and move at
about the same speed — generally 100 feet per minute, or just over 1mph.
The main difference is incline. An escalator sits at about
30 degrees, but a moving walk’s incline is typically no more than one-tenth of
that. Many moving walks are flat.
Escalators and moving walks ease the movement of billions of
people through airports, shopping malls, and other public spaces each year.
Escalators and moving walks are widely seen as very safe.
But, like virtually any form of public transportation, they occasionally
malfunction.
In Australia, for example, inspectors in the state of
Queensland found two recent examples of moving walks that were operating with a
missing pallet, the technical term for the metal slats that separate passengers
from the whirring machinery below.
And in Thailand, a passenger at Don Mueang International
Airport reported losing a shoe to the machinery of a moving walk in 2019, Thai
news media outlets reported this past week.
Background: How likely is an accident on an airport walkway?
Data for the safety of moving walks is scarce. But if we go
by escalator-safety data, the answer is “not very.”
An average of 2 deaths per year in the US involve
escalators, lower than the figure for elevators, according to a 2013 review of
US government data by the Center for Construction Research and Training, a nonprofit
group in Maryland.
The risk of injury is higher: About 10,000 escalator-related
injuries result in a trip to the emergency room in the US each year. But even
that figure is exceedingly small if you consider the sheer volume of escalator
and moving walk trips that people take every day.
In Thailand, the moving walk where the accident occurred
this past week had been used at Don Mueang International since 1996, the
airport’s director, Karant Thanakuljeerapat, told reporters.
Don Mueang carried more than 13 million domestic passengers
last year, and nearly twice as many in the years immediately before the
coronavirus pandemic, according to government data. So, over nearly three
decades, a moving walk there could have carried many tens of millions of passengers.
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