Another woman killed in China, in elevator accident this time
A woman was killed while taking an elevator in China on Thursday morning, the latest in a string of accidents involving building machinery.
The 21-year-old entered from the 16th story of an apartment block in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province in eastern China, local reports said.
She was partly in the elevator when it suddenly went up, and her head was caught in the elevator.
A resident told the media that there were frequent problems with the elevators in the building, which was built in the 1990s.
There was another accident in Jiangsu on Monday, which resulted in the death of a woman, Xinhua reported.
The woman was stuck in a gap between a cargo lift and the lift platform in Wuxi City. “Her body was severely distorted when rescuers arrived at the scene,” Xinhua said.
The two lift accidents came in the same week an escalator fault caused a woman to be crushed in the escalator machinery in Hubei.
READ: Escalator swallows toddler’s mother in China
Xiang Liujuan, 30, died after falling through a loose escalator landing panel in a shopping center in Hubei.
The video of Xiang being “swallowed” by the escalator after pushing her son to safety went viral, and has brought China’s safety standards into the spotlight.
READ: China’s safety standards in spotlight after fatal escalator incident
In another incident on Monday, a one-year-old’s left arm was caught in the stairs of an escalator in a shopping mall in China’s Guangxi region.
The child’s arm, which rescuers pulled out half an hour later, was mangled.
A 2014 survey on 2,523 elevators aged 15 years or older showed 7 percent of them had major safety risks, state media Xinhua news agency said.
The Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) of China has also revealed that almost five in 100 lifts and escalators have been found with problems.
Last year, there were 48 elevator and escalator-related accidents in China with a total of 36 deaths reported to quality inspection authorities, according to the administration, Xinhua said.
