A child slips on the escalator, their hand goes in the space between the side of the steps and the wall. The fingers are crushed, the hand is sliced through and cannot be saved. These scenarios are just two examples of the more than one-thousand estimated side wall entrapments that occur in the United States every year. No one knows exactly how many there are in Canada but the limited figures we obtained, suggest the numbers are significant. And that the majority of those injured are children.
Most entrapments happen on escalators that are within the limit.
Alberta Labour has investigated a dozen incidents in the last five years. In every case, the side wall clearances were to code. In Vancouver, a Canadian inventor may have found a simple and inexpensive way of preventing the hundreds of side wall entrapments that happen every year. It's called the escastrip. Pieces of flexible plastic that glue into the edges of the step.