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Escalators and Crocs: a dangerous pairing
December 10th, 2008 by Kurt Niland
On July 15, three-year-old Caprice Robinson and her mother, Diaarra Griffin, were making their daily hour-long commute in Atlanta. Caprice grabbed her mother’s hand and the two stepped onto the escalator at the Kensington MARTA station – just another small part of the daily routine they had done so many times before.
This time, however, Caprice began to scream in pain within second of stepping onto the escalator.
The shoe on her right foot, an imitation of the Crocs shoes so many children wear, had become caught between the moving stairs and the side of the escalator and it was slowly but steadily pulling Caprice’s foot in.
Caprice and her mother both screamed for help, but the escalator didn’t stop until they had ridden it practically all the way down. Rescuers from the Fire Department had to pry the escalator stairs apart to free Caprice’s foot, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The incident destroyed Caprice’s small toe and peeled the skin off her foot. She underwent surgery to reattach the lost skin, but her doctors aren’t certain that Caprice has fully recovered. Only time will tell if she will require additional surgeries.
Earl Everett, director of safety engineering at the Georgia Department of Labor, responsible for inspecting and licensing escalators and moving walkways, claims the machinery is safe.
“Most of it is actually rider-related. There’s not much equipment failure at all,” he told the AJC. “You’re on a piece of moving machinery, and that requires riders to pay attention,” he said.
While some safety advocates insist the escalator manufacturers could do more to improve the safety of the machines, others blame Croc shoes and Croc-style shoes for mishaps like Caprice’s.
The AJC reviewed reports of injuries filed from January to August of 2008. It found that of 140 reports, seven involved foot entrapment similar to Caprice’s ordeal. All except two of the incidents involved children wearing Crocs or similar shoes.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) recently issued a warning about wearing
“popular soft-sided flexible clogs and slides” on escalators. The agency says that such shoes were involved in all but two of the 77 foot entrapment incidents in the last 12 years.
A couple of months after the CPSC warning, Crocs Inc. announced that it would start putting escalator safety messages on the tags of the shoes it manufactures.
Hit by mounting reports of foot entrapment incidents on escalators and two petitions, the escalator industry moved to voluntarily increase safety standards by reducing the gap and friction along the sides of escalator steps in 2000.
The CPSC, however, has not monitored the improvements to see if they are working as it claimed it would eight years ago. The agency instead says that Crocs and similar style shoes are at fault in all of the escalator incidents.
