Shopping mall death: Staff knew escalator was broken

The scene of the escalator.

An escalator that killed a mother at a Chinese mall was known to be broken before the fatal accident took place, it has been revealed.

Xiang Liujuan, 30, was killed when the footplate at the top of the escalator collapsed beneath her, as she shopped with her two-year-old son in Hubei province.

Before being dragged into the machinery, however, the heroic mother was able to throw her toddler to safety.

It has now emerged that staff at the Jingzhou mall knew screws on the footplate had worked loose five minutes before the incident.

Chen Guanxin, head of the Jingzhou Work Safety Administration, told the South China Morning Post that workers at the mall were looking into repairing the escalator when Xiang was killed.

It appears from the video that two employees of the mall had been posted at the top of the escalator to keep an eye on the broken escalator.

Zhang Wei, the husband of Xiang was shopping with his family and witnessed the accident from the floor below, believes that the two staff members had tried to warn his wife of the fault.

"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 was broken," Zhang's uncle told Chinese news site Thepaper.cn.

Charles Wong Kai-hon, an expert on lift and escalator safety with the Vocational Training Council in Hong Kong said that the design of the escalator was questionable if it needed screws to fasten the footplate.

"Using screws is not a reliable or safe design," he told the South China Morning Post.

"The cover of the machine space should be held stable. It should not be able to rotate as had happened in this case," he added.

Social media users in China highlighted that none of the three shop assistants tried to press the emergency button to stop the escalator after Xiang was trapped.

The women tried to help Xiang to safety as half of her body dangled into the shaft above the machinery, but were unable to.

Initial reports claimed that maintenance had just been carried out on the escalator, and that workers had forgotten to screw the access cover back into place.

Rescue crews reportedly took four hours to remove the woman's body from the escalator, which showed 'no signs of life'.

The mall has yet to make a formal statement about the incident.