According to MARTA, the business responsible for maintaining the agency’s elevators and escalators carried out a thorough assessment and replaced all impacted parts. Additionally, the escalator has been approved by the state inspector to resume operations.
During major events, the transit agency said that it would be strengthening its efforts to regulate crowds at stations with high ridership. According to the state’s inquiry, the issue was caused in part by the large number of passengers.
According to a statement from Ralph McKinney, MARTA’s chief safety and quality assurance officer, “These units are safe to use, and we ask customers to follow staff, sign instructions, and board them single file.”
Staff, barricades, and signs instructing travelers to board in single file will all be part of the crowd management measures, according to MARTA. Staff will still be present on platforms and at station entrances.
According to MARTA officials, on the night of the event, they had roughly half as many employees working as was required for crowd management.No one was in charge of the escalator’s entrances.
Since the event, MARTA has maintained that the escalator malfunctioned due to a crush of people crammed into it after a woman’s scream at spotting a bug generated fear. However, other concertgoers, escalator specialists, injured riders, and security camera evidence have all contested that.
Although MARTA did not characterize the throng as a stampede in its news release on Friday, it did state that the inquiry found that the escalator’s unexpected passenger load caused the belts to come loose from their systems, the emergency brakes to engage, and the escalator to speed up.
Credit: Georgia Fire Commissioner’s Office of Insurance and Safety
Credit: Georgia Fire Commissioner’s Office of Insurance and Safety
According to the state’s study, a high passenger traffic led to operational problems, but it makes no mention of the belts coming loose. According to the study, it is actually unclear whether the belts were absent when the incident occurred or whether the occurrence caused the belts to come off the pulley.
Emergency brakes are not mentioned in the state report.
The passenger load caused the belts to come loose and the emergency brakes to deploy, according to an internal inquiry conducted by MARTA and maintenance contractor Schindler, according to MARTA spokesman Stephany Fisher. How the inquiry came to that conclusion is unknown.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution spoke with escalator experts who insisted that a brake problem was eventually to blame, stating that they ought to have engaged within a tenth of a second when it accelerated. The escalator is shown speeding for at least seven seconds in the video.
