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Two people who ended up in a pile at the bottom of that malfunctioning escalator at Back Bay sue MBTA, escalator company; MBTA now suing escalator company, too

Two Louisiana residents yesterday sued the MBTA and escalator company Kone, Inc. for the injuries they say they suffered when an escalator they were riding up from the commuter-rail platform at Back Bay suddenly reversed, sending people hurtling back to the platform in a heap on Sept. 26, 2021.

They join two other Louisiana residents, Karson and Holly Bethay, who were even more seriously injured - they had to be admitted to Mass. General - in suing over the escalator reversal.

The Bethays, however, have dropped the MBTA from their suit and are now attempting to make Kone, Inc. pay for the aftermath of the escalator reversal, which they say include the need for ongoing medical care.

The MBTA, in turn, is now also suing Kone, alleging both that the company failed to adequately maintain the escalator and ignored a clause in its contract for escalator maintenance to reimburse the T for any legal costs over lawsuits involving escalators. The T says Kone inspected the escalator just three weeks before the incident.

In the latest suit, filed in Suffolk Superior Court, Laura Sapp, of Metairie, LA, and Kathleen Lamkin, of Abita Springs, LA, say they had just gotten off a commuter train and were on their way up to the street level when the escalator suddenly reversed:

As a result of the subject escalator's malfunction, plaintiff Laura Sapp fell and was crushed against the moving escalator stairs by the weight of other escalator passengers that fell on top of her, resulting in numerous injuries including, but not limited to, disfiguring lacerations to her scalp, lacerations and contusions to her hands, and impact injuries to her shoulder resulting in a labral tear.

As a result of the subject escalator's malfunction, other passengers collided with Kathleen Lamkin, resulting in her tumbling over the top of the other passengers on the way to the train's platform landing. During her decent, her ankle was caught, and twisted, resulting in injuries, including but not limited to injury to her ankle.

Their complaint does not say if they knew the Bethays, who came up to Massachusetts to see the New Orleans Saints play the Patriots in Foxborough, and who were returning from that game when the incident happened.

In their suit, the Bethays - also suing on behalf of their two children and two friends' children who were with them - claim Kone, and an as yet unknown "John Doe" were negligent in general but specifically for failing to take certain steps that might have prevented the escalator from shifting into reverse and not stopping.

They allege that Kone failed to adequately inspect the one brake on the escalator to ensure it would actually work and that despite two similar incidents on the same escalator - in 1996 and 2011 - it decided not to install a second brake as a backup.

The 2011 reverse was similar to the 2021 incident: People were streaming up for a Bruins Stanley Cup parade when the escalator suddenly started going down. At least one boy had his feet sucked into the escalator mechanism; his mother had footprints on her back from where she was trampled.

In its answer to the Bethays's complaint, Kone says it is not to blame in part because nobody ever told it of any dangerous conditions or defective parts on the escalator, but that, in any case, whatever happened is entirely the fault of "a third-party or parties for whom the Defendant was not responsible," because of "modifications and/or alterations made by other persons or entities for whom the Defendant was not and is not responsible."

Also, the Bethays are mostly to blame, or in legal terms, "plaintiffs' comparative negligence was greater than that of the Defendants," Kone alleges.

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Comments

who illegally hit the switch to reverse the escalator, not sue the company. Escalators do not simply reverse themselves. Of course, the Transit Police make excuses not to check their cameras, because if they did on that day, they would have caught the culprit.

For those with bad reading comprehension, I will repeat. ESCALATORS DO NOT REVERSE BY THEMSELVES. Someone flipped the switch, and unlikely it was a police, emergency or maintenance person, therefore illegal. If the escalator stopped moving and people got injured, that could be a lawsuit. But this case is an escalator reversing, which is only possible by someone flipping a switch (or hacking the wires to reverse the electrical engineering, but that would be much easier to get caught attempting).

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What the hell are you talking about?

Escalators don't just have a switch that anyone can flip to make them go backwards. That would be beyond stupid. You need a key.

And even if it had gone backwards at normal speed, that wouldn't have caused people to tumble down. Not only did the police bother to check their cameras, but the video was made public. Google mbta back bay escalator video to find it. It's obvious from watching it that the escalator malfunctioned slipped backwards way faster than normal speed.

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There is no switch someone could just throw on a whim. You have no idea what you are talking about. You need to have a key to change direction and it's not something you can do subtly as the escalator stops when you move the key to change direction before starting again. This was a malfunction not a intentional act

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For those with bad reading comprehension, I will repeat. ESCALATORS DO NOT REVERSE BY THEMSELVES. Someone flipped the switch

So, where is this "switch", exactly? How does it work and who has access to it?

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Yeah, any ne'er-do-well can stick out their hand and cause this type of tragedy at any time. It's too bad the police are being lazy when it would be so simple for them to watch the video to catch the person.

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Yeah, any ne'er-do-well can stick out their hand and cause this type of tragedy at any time.

I admit I'm not escalator engineer, but while I believe I recall seeing emergency stop buttons on escalators that a passenger could reach, I am sure I've never seen a "switch" that would cause an escalator to reverse itself rapidly. Again, help me out if you know otherwise.

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A ne'er-do-well passing by needs to flip on your sarcasm detector switch.

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Look for a mid-winter sale on sarcasm meters, yours appears to be broken.

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It's been a while since I watched the video, but to my untrained eye it didn't look like the escalator actually ran in reverse; it seemed like both the forward driving mechanism and the brake failed, and the weight of the people standing on the escalator pushed the whole thing backwards due to the incline. Once everybody had been dumped at the bottom the escalator stopped. I could be misremembering, of course.

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but to make the escalator do anything else, such as start up again (let alone change direction), someone needs a key.

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Well.... It might be likely... But...
"Through the statistics of escalator reversal accidents, the cause of the accident was fully investigated, and it was found that the faults mainly occurred in the grid voltage fluctuations, reversal protection devices, and the host, drive chain, and cascade chains in the rung system. "
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jmath/2021/6294869/

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