The Aviamotornaya Escalator Disaster of 1982 | Episode 48

We've covered a lot of unusual and unexpected disasters on this show, and this is going to be a new one for sure. And what makes this one stand out how quickly it escalates. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and unspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you will unlock a brand new fear that you didn't even know about. We'll talk about the most panic inducing cross training exercise ever, and we will teach you the best way to not get eaten by a machine. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that can potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. When I say subway, you're probably thinking of America's finest handcrafted artisanal sandwiches. Not today, I'm talking underground electric railroad commuter systems. They don't smell as good as subway, but they're faster than buses, and they're cheaper than gabs, and they hold a lot more people. They're quick and convenient and sometimes frustrating, and once in a blue moon, they demand blood. You could see our previous subway related episodes from more on that. Subway as a term, literally means beneath the way, at least in North America. Other countries call them metros or undergrounds. And it all started back in eighteen sixty in England with the underground. Back then, you couldn't even begin to imagine what an incredible miracle it was. The whole idea of a train that ran underground, moving people from one part of the city to another without impacting the world above other than reducing the amount of foot traffic. Yeah, governments around the world took one look and said one please. In spite of the difficulty of actually building the things. See, in a major city, you can't just move buildings out of the way, or you can't just burrow a tunnel through someone's basement, so you had to dig beneath all of it. Back then, these people were inventing technologies for this as they went along. Today we get to use tunnel boring machines. But back then, men and probably a lot of children said goodbye to the sunlight and fresh air and broke their backs using hand tools to carve and excavate massive passages and caverns beneath the city. And yes, it was dangerous work. Sometimes these people might get hit in the head with a rock, or maybe the entire ceiling might come down on them. They risk playing catch with chunks of exploding machinery like steam boilers, and you could even drown if you dug the wrong way. The reigning champion of public transit is China, with forty five different elaborate underground systems across the country. I know you're already starting to shout USA, USA, but they've only got fifteen. And I say fifteen, but it's really murky. Some people love to argue that they have a rail system that goes underground for a second and that makes them a subway too. Well, don't feel bad. Here in Canada. We only have three major underground systems and we're the second largest country in the world. So obviously, with Russia being the largest country, well, what do they have like one hundred and thirty five well, no, they only have seven, but their system is something else altogether. It's on a whole different level. Around the world, transit is pretty utilitarian. And when I say Russian subway station, you have to imagine it has all the warmth and heart of a department of motor vehicles. But you could not be more wrong. The idea behind communism was to abolish class struggle by eliminating the whole class system. And this meant that everyone was to be treated as equals and the state control of everything, and everyone gets provisioned out by big brother, and everyone benefits equally. And because of this, they reasoned that places that brought people together should be treated as cathedrals to celebrate them and their accomplishments. And they were, billions were spent, and when they were unveiled. Let me put it this way, if not for a technicality, each of these stations would have become their own UNESCO World Heritage Site. Statues and mosaics and engravings and murals celebrate the themes of Russian life, art, industry, technology and accomplishment. And they often get mistaken for museums. And no two stations are alike. But we're ordinary Russians living in shared apartments trying to eke out in existence, while Stalin was off turning the subways into the palatial, ornate subterranean cathedrals. Oh all right, sure, I see why you could say that. But they were built as a symbol of the Russian people's utopia. And I don't even know if i'd point fingers. I mean, government spending billions while their people starved. Happens in every country I've ever been to, including my own. Russia just did it with flair, and this, of course, was the other side of that coin. The state controlled all the wealth. The Moscow subway was ordered by Joseph Stalin himself back in nineteen thirty one, and people have called them Stalin's version of Saddam Hussein's palaces. But whatever it took to keep Stalin's mustache happy. Along the Saint Lawrence River and Quebec. When I was a kid, I was in a village with rows of homes with different colored roofs. Do you know what they told me? They did it because when they were stone drunk, the people could figure out which house was theirs. And to some degree, it's the same thing here. The rule of distinction made each station easily identifiable, and it wasn't just the designs that made them unique. Most stations around the world are maybe a couple dozen feet underground, but cities like Moscow and Saint Petersburg were built on fairly wet soil a long time before anybody knew about these kinds of things, So when they started digging, they were forced to dig deep. One station is deep as a twenty eight story building. And because of this, a lot of people figured they were built deep to make a fair place to survive enemy air raids. After all, England used theirs as shelters during the war. Well that wasn't what it was the water. But today stations do actually have automated systems to shut out radioactive contamination. So there you go. And on this trip, we're spending our time in Moscow. Moscow is the capital of Russia and it's big. It's the largest city on the European continent. And I'm not going to go into its whole history, but one interesting thing, you know, the Kremlin military heart of the country onion shaped domes. Well it is considered the largest medieval fortress in the world. Pretty cool. Back in nineteen eighty two, Moscow was home to more than eight million people. That was more than London or New York City. Then wait, you say we're going to the subway, the Russian subway. Well, I've already given you the idea that they're beautiful. But after that time it handed you all those safety tips about the New York City subway, you got to think that the Scout subway must be like commuting in a game of Mortal Kombat. Well, to compare the two. While the New York City Subway reports thousands of incidents every year, the busiest line of the Moscow subway, line seven, hasn't had a single serious incident since nineteen sixty five, and there's been less than a dozen shootings in almost a century. So yeah, it's reportedly pretty safe. Reportedly was sett in quotes for emphasis, and we'll come back to that later. There is, of course, the occasional terrorist attack or tunnel collapsed, ghastly derailment, fire explosion in or just crash, but we're not worried about that today. Welcome to the Avia Motornaya station. The station's central hallway ceiling is domed with gold pyramids and supported by glazed marble columns and frescoed with constellations on the far wall as a metal sculpture depicting Icarus. Remember the guy who flew too close to the sun with homemade wings made of wax. The theme of Aviamtnaya is flight. Every station on the line celebrates some accomplishment or industry of Russia, and I'll take a second just to say that others are reported to double as haunted tourist spots. People have claim to have encountered ghosts from as far back as the Russian Civil War, and some of them even our horseback. I'm trying to imagine what a ghost horse must sound like. Boom Sokol station apparently has blood soaked World War two soldiers, and some people have run into the ghost of a conductor who burned to death in an accident. He apparently wanders around a track level and he appears as a charred husk, and he's always in a rage because he wants revenge on the supervisors who blamed him for the accident. But although the system is apparently full of ghosts, being all, what about my needs? We're going to focus on the commute at hand. Aviamoto Nayo is a beautiful and historic place to be, but it could take a while to get there. Can you imagine climbing the height of a seventeen story building to catch a train? Now, thanks so escalators, huh oh yes, And even on an escalator, the trip took whole minutes. Unlike elevators, escalators were invented to create a steady flow for large numbers of people without people having a stand around waiting for the return of an elevator. Imagine a staircase made out of aluminum or stainless steel steps that move on a system of hidden tracks in a continuous loop that pulls the steps from the bottom back up to the top. You typically find them in malls and airports and department stores and subway stations, you know, anywhere with a lot of foot traffic that needs to travel vertically. And my favorite part about them is normally if one breaks down, it just turns into stairs. Most escalators have a handrail that keeps pace with the moving of the steps, and holding them helps the riders keep steady when stepping on and off the moving stairs. The structure that contains the handrails is called the balustrade, and you don't have to remember that, and I don't even know if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but it will come up later. The mornings and evenings were especially busy. You got to remember, Moscow has the busiest subway system in the world, and it was considered practically the safest mode of transportation because there were so few, if any, actual accidents that we know of. Avionmodanaya station alone handles over a million passengers a year, so yeah, it can get cozy. The station had four matching escalators running in parallel, but only three of them had been running this morning, and as the station became busier, the attendants activated the escalator that had been turned off Escalator number four two days earlier. It had been taken out of service for a routine safety check. New brakes had just been installed a few months earlier, and this inspection revealed that there was a little retouching needed on the brakes system, which they got, including the clean bill of health. The brakes being installed were being spopped out in all the Moscow stations around that time. They let the escalator run for fifteen minutes as a safety precaution before on blocking it, and just like a lane opening up at a supermarket, people swarm to it immediately and appreciatively. It didn't make things any less busy at track level, but it made the crowd at the surface level pretty happy. At both ends of an escalator, you're going to find yourself a landing platform, and these platforms hide all the machinery that makes the magic happen. A motor and main drive gear were found at the top, while the bottom platform contains return idler'sprockets, whatever the hell those are. The platforms act as a place to stand before stepping onto the moving steps, and each landing and step is edged with a kind of toothy little comb pattern. They designed them this way to prevent anything from getting caught in the steps as they pass, and safety is a concern with any device this complicated. Sometimes someone wearing crocs gets their foot shot for not paying attention. Sometimes someone mangles an arm or a leg. It's incredibly rare, but there have been times when one of the steps just suddenly drops out and the writer finds themselves falling into the machinery below. And when scouring the internet for advice on what to do if this ever happened to you, the advice was unanimous. Sue so yes to get back on point. The escalators at Aviamoto Naya were ridiculously long. They ran in parallel, two going up, two going down, and down, and down and down. The station itself sat fifty three meters or one hundred and seventy three feet beneath the ground. That right there as as tall as a sixteen story building. But escalators are angled to thirty degrees, you know, like pac Man's mouth. So this escalator was actually eighty three meters or two hundred and seventy two feet long. That is a whopping seven hundred and forty steps. The trip itself takes a full two minutes, and that's long enough for most people to forget why they even got on the thing. The deepest station in Russia is Park Pobody. It's eighty four meters deep, the height of twenty eight stories, and the escalator itself is one hundred and twenty six meters or four hundred and thirteen feet long. And by my math, I think that trip takes about two hours twenty five minutes each way. Back at Avia modern Hya, the busy after work in shopping crowds were growing by the minute, and the station was in full swing until about five pm. Run the officer on duty and charge of the escalators, notice some unusual movement. The handrail was shaking on escalator number four. He tried slowly applying the brakes to kind of feel out what was happening, but they didn't do anything, and his curiosity morphed into full on astonishment. In fact, the handrail on escalator number four began to speed up, following almost immediately by the steps themselves. People and the neighboring escalators choked about how unfair it was that number four was so quick, why did they get the express escalator, But the situation escalated quickly, and with seconds it was moving at least twice as fast as the others, and their jealous reactions turned to horror. By this time, the brake operator leapt from his booth and he ran to hammer the auxiliary emergency brake on the balustrade, but nothing. About a hundred people lost their balance and began to follow, but those who lots of footing took others down with them lot of dominos like a downhill race in dominoes, and as riders reached the back landing, they piled on each other by the second, blocking the lower platform. It became like a snowbank made of humanity, and with each new body the amount of weight increased, making getting out of the way more impossible. By this second, people on the escalator had maybe a second or two to decide what were they going to do once they reach the bottom, jump, start running over the pile, leap over the side onto a different escalator. And if you're thinking, well, at least the people did panic, will let me disavalue of that right now. Some people panic so hard they tried running back up the stairs, which caused even more people to fall, and it was contagious. People on the neighboring escalator saw the disaster unfolding and a massive pool of blood forming at the base, and reacted just as poorly, creating their own stampede. Yeah, or slide down a staircase. Imagine sliding down a staircase with a pile of screaming adults riding you like a toboggin, and remembering that the edges of the steps were basically lying with metal teeth that gnarled and chewed flesh. You know that if you have a bleeding wound you're supposed to apply pressure to prevent blood loss, but that was not going to be a problem here. There were plenty of screaming bodies arriving by the second to bear you and apply all the pressure you could ever want it. I didn't do this math myself, but all told, the total weight of this human dogpile was said to be to twenty four thousand pounds. Some were able to miraculously slip through the pile and they were spat out, bruised but alive. Hearing the screens from below, people instinctively jumped over the balustrade to get over to the neighboring escalator ballo oh eh, right, the divider that supports the handrails, and this is a divider that was never intended to hold people's white and people jumping on for their lives found themselves falling through darkness to a concrete reception at the bottom, which does not make for a comfy landing. And though still on the escalator, people began to find their shoes and socks and coats and even their underwear getting sucked into the escalator belt. It's hard to imagine, but it happens. A Seattle man died when an escalator caught a piece of his shirt. He strangled them to death in twenty thirteen. In twenty fourteen, a Montreal woman's scarf became caught in an escalator, and when she tried to free it, her hair became cost Imagine being strangled to death by your stylistic choices. You have to remember escalators don't work off magic and elastics. The force of the bodies grating and pushing against the open tooth platform was enough to shred skin and fracture bone. What everyone found beneath the stairs were gears, gears and machinery that never stopped worrying and spinning and chewing and crushing limbs, and reportedly more than one hundred people were maimed. And if you're ally it is maiming exactly, we'll let me reward you for your curiosity. A maiming is, by definition, an injury that permanently damages or destroys a body part. Helpful synonyms include added, crippled, mangled, and mutilated. Case in point, there was a man who found his leg pin between the platform and the last step, and because it hadn't just ripped off clean, they had to cut it off to get him out of there. So you're being drawn into the gears of an escalator, but you've got an attorney on the phone and they're more interested in your compensation than your composition. Tell your lawyer you'll call them back and check out. This. Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics says that about six thousand people are injured by escalators every year, most from falling, and if you've never been on one, it can be pretty weird to step from a solid surface to something moving away from you. People time it wrong, they lose their balance, and then they eat it on the stairs. Most people get distracted with kids, or bags or the world around them, and they take that first step horizontally. So few people take escalators naked that the statistics are useless. But for everyone else, pant legs, bagstraps, scarves, shoelaces, and heels all can get caught between the steps and invite riders to the ground. Good news, though, depending on your age bracket, the elderly and children make up ninety percent of all escalator disasters. Bad news, though, they don't make up ninety percent of the ridership, so it's more likely that you would be the one getting unexpectedly wiped out playing catch. When most people hear about escalator falls, they think of someone tumbling down the entire staircase from top to bottom. So what can you do to make sure that's not you? Oh, will leave me? There's a list. Don't sit on an escalator that is really just begging for it, and don't let your wee ones on without holding onto their hands, and for crying out loud, tie your shoelaces. Most people get thrown when they try to make the switch to or from a moving surface to the stationary one, especially the elderly. Like we said, but if you throw a walker or a cane into the mix, you are just asking for trouble. Be careful bringing strollers or any rolling devices on the stairs if you have to, and if you have the option of taking an elevator, that's what they're there for. And I really shouldn't have to say this, but wheelchairs, hubbboards, shopping carts, roller skates, these have no place on an escalator. But I do have to say that because I've seen someone ski down one before. And don't stand sideways or drape off the side. All cool like you don't even know what you're rebelling against. Stand on the center of the steps like everyone else, and don't try to create TikTok gold by standing the stride the railings like your old school aquaman riding a pair of porpoises porpie. The records don't lie, and those people have a nasty habit of falling onto their skulls and necks and spines. And also sometimes guardrails come loose, or they're too low, or they're just poorly maintained. And poorly maintained doesn't just mean slippery or sticky. Escalator motors control speed and can experience power surges that can really rearrange your teeth. There's always an emergency stop at the top and bottom of all escalators, and when they malfunction and something goes wrong, that party won't stop. The best way to ride unintentionally on an escalator is on your back. You will absolutely pay for the experience, but your butt cakes make the best padding you've got, and face first only sets you up for a list of issues you can only imagine. And the best thing to do once you hit bottom is to keep moving. Roll, slide, scooch whatever you can manage and if you're too injured to help anyone, just be safe and get out of the way. And I tell you these things because this is the kind of accident that comes out of nowhere, and because this is a negligent homicide podcast, I have to inform you that escalator repairs are kind of expensive, and sometimes property owners aren't in a real hurry to show out for repairs or to tell people that they need them. Bodies were quietly removed and no one was allowed to talk about what had happened. The press only acknowledged the disaster with a blurb that among the passengers were victims, and that was tuxed somewhere in the corner of one of the last pages of one newspaper. It's the same with all our Russian stories. The press paints a fairly minimalist review, and getting factual details out of the government is like pulling teeth by mail. So the rumor mill started up. And when you grow up in a society that doesn't embrace free press, you have to rely on your imagination a lot. The people of Moscow already had their subway legends, ghosts like we said, secret line and passageways, and even an entire hidden city. But in this case it was all about the gore. It was broken telephone where he broke his nose morphed into All they found were his toes. People described hundreds of dead being torn apart, with limbs flying everywhere. They made comparisons between the station and the blood soaked elevators in Kubrick's hotel. And yes, obviously it was exaggerated, but only a little, and this created its own kind of panic. After nine months, the Novo Roskoslova newspaper finally broke with the official policy to protect the people from quote socially dangerous negativity, and they wrote, according to eyewitnesses, as a result of a break in the overcrowded escalator, several hundred people fell into a mechanism that continued to rotate. Dozens were crushed, more than a hundred were crippled. All this happened in front of people moving on a parallel escalator, and there was a panic among them, which caused additional casualties. So a committee was organized to investigate the accident, and it was time for some headster roll. And I would love to tell you who was at fault and what their sentences were but again Russia. I do know that the station manager was found to be responsible and removed, whatever that means. The officials declared that thirty were seriously wounded and that eight had died, So what the hell actually happened? While you'll remember that time I shared the pilot for sleep manuals and no one made it through it because it was the most boring podcast ever created. Well, when the service breaks were being updated the year before, a man named Zevoskin was in charge. He did the job, but what he didn't have or views was the specific updated Instruction Manual four the new T sixty five twenty one five IE. He was more familiar with the existing LT four model and he mostly winged it from memory without the new guide and spoiler. This did not quite do the trick, and because these new parts had been calibrated to old standards, this led to premature wear and tear and like the escalators were working just fine, but they'd actually been stuck in emergency mode without anyone realizing for months, And on February seventeenth, one of the steps broke. A forensic technological examination concluded that the steps had melt through electro riveted joints, which sounds cool, But on that day this step broke cycled around underneath the loop, and as it passed the upper coma of the escalator, it got stuck, and this to form the upper working gears and rods, and this broke the clutch between the driving gears of the engine, which left the thread free to move in any direction. It likes like a car on a hill in neutral, and now it was in free fall and the emergency censor didn't work. The faulty configuration of the emergency sensor and wiring stopped the brakes from activating automatically, and even with the station attendant kicking the hell out of the emergency break, the breaking system was not powerful enough to stop the momentum and hold the weight of all those passengers. The escalator quickly hit two and a half times the normal operating speed, and the passengers were whooshed to the bottom and thrown into a heap. The tragedy lasted all of one hundred and ten seconds. Every station was going to have to be checked and two dozen we're going to have to be closed, which would effectively paralyze the entire system and create a shit storm for the local government, which is another reason for all the secrecy and cover up. Just one year later, two trains would collide at Blaruskaya station, and I would tell you how many people died, but I can't because according to senior officials, there was no accident. All that blood and screaming must have come for maintenance. In Sovia, Russia, leadership was always concerned about the knock at the door bag over the head early retirement surprise party. So the Aviamotanaya station was quietly overhauled in just three weeks by a crew of seventy working around the clock. They strengthened the steps and the balustrades, and properly updated and repaired the machinery and breaking system. The other stations were inspected and repaired more quietly and gradually to help people forget There are those who remember the stains of blood that the cleaning women couldn't remove, no matter how long or how hard they scrubbed. The Moscow subway has been home to bombings, fires and crashes whose stories will likely never be told. No compensation was ever paid to the relatives, and the case was quickly hushed up and forgotten. The need for the appearance of a strong state trumped reality and the people quietly paid the price. And this is why Russians can't have nice things. See, all this secrecy and silence makes it very hard to learn from past mistakes. And there are those who will say that the Aviamutnaya escalator disaster will be remembered as one of the darkest days in the history of the Moscow Metro. And as strange as it sounds to say, I hope that's true. All I can say for certain is that what happened at the Aviamotonaya station that day was one of the worst escalator disasters of all time. Years ago, I was standing behind an old woman who fell backwards on an escalator at a subway station here in Toronto. She wanged her head pretty good on the step and was largely nonresponsive and her hair was entangled in the steps. I had a knife with me and I was about to get insue. The back of her haird off as we approached the landing platform to save her scalp when somebody finally hit the auxiliary break. Yeah. Once you actually start to study escalators, there is scary as hell. I was on one last week in an airport that was squeaking and stuttering, and I had just finished all this research, so yeah, scary as hell. And I guess that's the thing. This disaster brought me right back to our very first episode on the sl one reactor disaster. Remember back in that one human error combined with improperly maintained technology to create the disaster, And it could not have happened without this teamwork. And the only real difference between unstable and nuclear reactors and escalators is that you need an embarrassing amount of vigilance to be safe on an escalator. And I wish luck to you all. You can reach out to us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as doomsday Podcast, or fire us an email to doomsday pod at gmail dot com. We're also on TikTok even though I've lost the credentials for it as doomsday dot dot podcast. Older episodes can be found wherever you've found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. If you want to support the ongoing production of the show, you can find us at Patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo, or you could buy me a coffee at buy Meacoffee dot com slash doomsday. But if you could spare the money and had to choose, we ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Manic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They are often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they've helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Global Medic dot ca. On next episode, when you hear people describe the Golden age of flying, you never hear anyone referred to the Golden Age of landing, and you won't in this episode either. It's the Grand Canyon midair disaster of nineteen fifty six. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.