MARTA escalator failed, injured woman says

Cyndi McCarty stepped on to Escalator #21 and began her descent into the Peachtree Center MARTA station. She was among thousands of buyers in Atlanta for a trade show five years ago, and she was anxious to beat the crowd.

About halfway down the escalator — which drops 75 vertical feet — McCarty said she heard a grinding noise. Then, suddenly, the escalator shook.

McCarty looked at her boss, Sande McDonald, for whom she worked in Lakeland, Fla. “We kind of joked about the vibration,” the 51-year-old McCarty said this week during a break in testimony in her lawsuit over the incident. “We had a rough flight coming in, and my boss said, ‘Ah turbulence.’”

A moment later, McCarty said, the escalator sped up, slowed, and then careened forward. Screaming riders struggled to stay afoot. A terrified woman handed her grandchild to a stranger, a bear of a man, for protection.

McCarty started running to keep her footing after leaving the escalator. She didn’t stop until she slammed into a wall. She and her group boarded a train with other riders, some still shedding tears of fright from the escalator episode. “I’m not a crybaby but it was horrifying,” McCarty said. “You are terrified. There is no place to go.”

Two days later she said she said couldn’t move her neck or right arm or shoulder. She learned she had broken a disc in her neck, which required two surgeries.

She is suing MARTA and Schindler Elevator Corp., which had the contract for escalator maintenance, for $1 million in Fulton County Superior Court. MARTA officials, however, contend no escalator free-fall took place and that the accident happened when a man fainted and knocked riders into each other like dominos.

The MARTA police report said that the escalator had been not running when the accident occurred on July 11, 2003. A transit report to Schindler, however, said the escalator “speeded up with patrons on it” but mechanics couldn’t find a problem.

Police Officer L.C. Turner testified this week that the escalator was not running when he started his shift mid-afternoon that day. Riders he interviewed said they were using it as a staircase when the accident happened around 6 p.m. — even though MARTA policy requires #21 to be repaired immediately because of the high volume of traffic.

Regardless of the competing viewpoints, McCarty’s description of an escalator crash matches that of other people who have suffered similar events.

Last New Year’s Eve, three MARTA escalators failed. Initially, MARTA officials blamed drunken revelers for causing a free fall at the Five Points Station, causing 11 injuries, but later admitted mechanical failures allowed the escalators to speed out of control.

MARTA General Manager Beverly Scott blamed the braking system of the three escalators and a weak motor. She contended then the transit system could only document one other case of an escalator going into a free fall and that was at the Civic Center station in 2002.

But riders interviewed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution describe free falls going back for more than a decade. Maintenance records acquired under the state Open Records Act showed that one of the escalators involved in the New Year’s Eve accident was reported as going into a “free fall” on Nov. 17. The repairman from Elevator Specialists, which now has the bulk of the maintenance contract, reported that he could not find a problem with the escalator.

McCarty contends Schindler failed to meet its own maintenance schedule and that the transit agency wasn’t reporting all escalator accidents to the city of Atlanta or the state, as it is required.

The expert witness she hired, Joseph Stabler of St. Louis, contended the maintenance schedule created the likelihood of escalators failing, especially when they were overloaded during big events such as ball games and trade shows.

“It is all foreseeable,” Stabler said. “It is like flying a jet. You don’t want to find out when you are descending that the engine is bad.”

John DeLorenzi, a veteran Schindler engineer who now serves as an expert witness, said the company used a team system that allowed its mechanics to do proper maintenance in shorter time frames than the hours required by the standard maintenance schedule.

“These are 26-year-old escalators and for them to be running that well can only be an indication of good maintenance,” he said and noted that no problem was found in escalator #21 “If the brake failed, why didn’t it fail the next time? Did it fix itself?”