A toddler had a lucky escape recently when he was rescued from an escalator handrail he was hanging from.
CCTV footage from a shopping centre in Xining County, which is in the city of Shaoyang in Central China’s Hunan Province, shows the little boy being dragged up the handrail and reaching heights of 30 feet.
Just as he reached the top, the toddler was noticed by a woman standing next to the escalator, who immediately rushed to his aid and pulled him from the handrail.
You can watch what happened below:
The footage shows the three-year-old standing alone at the bottom of the escalator, which led to the first floor of the store, just after 11am local time last Wednesday (September 11).
After running his hands along the moving handrail belt, his clothes become caught in the machinery and he is lifted off the ground. The helpless boy ends up sprawled across the top of the narrow handrail as it carries him approximately 30 feet up the side of the escalator.
Subsequent footage from the first floor shows a multitude of people gathering on the floor below, staring up at the toddler who could have fallen off the side of the escalator at any point – facing serious injury or possibly even death.
Thankfully, an employee in the store noticed the little boy coming towards her and rushed to the top of the escalator, waiting for him to get closer before she lifted him to safety.
The boy was fortunately not injured as a result of the incident, thanks to the fast thinking and subsequent actions of the store employee.
As of yet, it is unclear whether the three-year-old’s guardians – who were nowhere to be seen throughout the 30 second long footage – have been spoken to by police.
Another young boy in China managed to escape a similar fate earlier this year when his arm was sucked into a faulty escalator during a shopping trip.
This time, his mum was right by his side but was unable to prevent the terrifying incident from unfolding and could only look on in horror as he was dragged along with the machinery.
As the toddler’s mum desperately tried to pick him up, a security guard ran through the crowd to get to the stop button and managed to hit it just seconds before the child reached the bottom of the escalator in the City Star shopping complex in Yuanjiang.
Thanks to the quick thinking of the security guard – similar to that of the store employee mentioned earlier – the boy was not believed to have broken any bones or suffered any life-threatening injuries in the freak incident.
Hopefully both boys will have made a speedy recovery and won’t be left too traumatised by the ordeals they went through.
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A Broadcast Journalism Masters graduate who went on to achieve an NCTJ level 3 Diploma in Journalism, Lucy has done stints at ITV, BBC Inside Out and Key 103. While working as a journalist for UNILAD, Lucy has reported on breaking news stories while also writing features about mental health, cervical screening awareness, and Little Mix (who she is unapologetically obsessed with).