Oh no… You absolutely can’t be doing maintenance on an escalator while people are walking on it. Not only unsafe, that’s just not going to work at all most of the time. The maintenance crew and the public would be in each other’s way.
On the other hand, when it breaks on a Monday, and the crew says they can be there to do the repair on Thursday, that means that it’s safe to use the escalator as stairs for a couple of days while you wait.
Escalators have brakes to prevent them from moving. If the escalator breakdown causes the brakes to fail, then it can accelerate enough to seriously injure people
If you’re afraid of this kind of thing, then don’t use escalators when they aren’t moving, that’s fine.
According to a quick Google search, there are 2-3 escalator related deaths per year in the US. That’s not just counting malfunctioning escalators, it also counts morons doing dumb things on escalators (and “within the US” includes every Florida Man out there).
You can worry about this if you like worrying, but it’s probably not worth it.
Multiple independent braking systems and adequate maintenance.
A single failure may cause the escalator to stop working, but it takes 3 failures in a row to make it catastrophic. Regular maintenance catches this failures before 3 in a row can occur.
Oh no… You absolutely can’t be doing maintenance on an escalator while people are walking on it. Not only unsafe, that’s just not going to work at all most of the time. The maintenance crew and the public would be in each other’s way.
On the other hand, when it breaks on a Monday, and the crew says they can be there to do the repair on Thursday, that means that it’s safe to use the escalator as stairs for a couple of days while you wait.
Escalators have brakes to prevent them from moving. If the escalator breakdown causes the brakes to fail, then it can accelerate enough to seriously injure people
Sure. But if the brakes have not failed… Then it’s safe to use for a reasonable period of time.
And how do you know that the brakes won’t fail?
If you’re afraid of this kind of thing, then don’t use escalators when they aren’t moving, that’s fine.
According to a quick Google search, there are 2-3 escalator related deaths per year in the US. That’s not just counting malfunctioning escalators, it also counts morons doing dumb things on escalators (and “within the US” includes every Florida Man out there).
You can worry about this if you like worrying, but it’s probably not worth it.
Multiple independent braking systems and adequate maintenance.
A single failure may cause the escalator to stop working, but it takes 3 failures in a row to make it catastrophic. Regular maintenance catches this failures before 3 in a row can occur.
And that regular maintenance has been put off before, causing instances of mass injuries.
My entire point here is that their insistence on laypeople going “eh, it’ll be fine” and using a broken escalator is stupid