Kalininskaya line - accidents and terrorist attacks. Blood in the subway
On February 17, 1982, two grannies-cleaners were called. They covered the pools of blood with sawdust and then wiped them away.
......
It took the passengers a few seconds to realize the danger of the situation in which they found themselves. The panic began. Those above heard the screams of people from below. Many tried to jump from the escalator onto the next one, or at least onto the plastic balustrade separating the escalators. Then it turns out that by all standards it had a coating that was too thin - 3 mm, which is why it broke, and people ended up in the resulting hole-trap. Someone couldn't resist and rolled on his back past the streetlights and down into chaos...
And down there, a bloody human mess was brewing.
......
...the collapsed stage is number 96. And the steps, unrestrained by nothing, are still rushing down, along with the people. Someone was lucky, he fell on the platform and managed to crawl away...
from here (links) rjohnson about Ulaanbaatar Metro!)
Here is a clipping from “Evening” dated February 18, 1992, discovered in my stash. There are two pictures for it (Vrez.jpg, and Eskalat.jpg) By the way, a few seconds after scanning, the clipping, which had lived for seven years, ceased its unblemished existence, having been filled with paint from the cartridge... :-(
Investigation "VM": ten years later
Tragedy at Aviamotornaya
Alexander DANILKIN
IN THE PICTURE: and today it is under repair - escalator No. 4.
Photo by R. FEDOROV.
A woman with a backpack stood on the step below me - already in the hospital I learned that she had died. The major stood behind me - he also died... (From the testimony of a witness).
Anyone you talk to is surprised: has it really been ten years? Ten... Exactly ten since then, a chic skimpy, not really revealing message shot out from the most inconspicuous newspaper corner. Word of mouth spread rumors throughout Moscow about a tragedy in the metro at the Aviamotornaya station that same evening. They were all monstrously fantastic. Suffice it to say that “enemy radio voices” broadcast that evening about the deaths of hundreds of people.
Almost every storyteller had his own version. I had to deal with one of them, which, by the way, is the most widespread among the Moscow people; meet now, while collecting material for this article. Namely: escalators of a new design were installed on the Kalininsky Radius metro line, and they were the reason for everything. Moreover, they knew that their “designers at one time received the Lenin Prize for their work, and then went off to the Middle East.” The second in line “culprit” was the duty officer, who “bewildered, while dozens of people fell into the underworld of the machine room” and, as if in a giant meat grinder, were ground by a giant mechanism”...
Scary. After that day, by the way, the number of passengers in the metro sharply decreased, albeit for a short time. But the official bodies were silent. A week, a month, six months. The investigation into the circumstances was completed by November 1982. The results, as happened for many years, were not widely disseminated. And the relatives of the dead, the maimed, and everyone else were waiting for them. Because the metro for Moscow is the metro, and it concerns almost everyone. But just the opposite happened. Already now, ten years later, I learned this from my interlocutors... For example, here. Most of those injured that evening were employees of enterprises located near Aviamotornaya. It just so happened: they all either go home after a hard day. After the tragedy, some organizations whose employees died in the accident... were prohibited from posting obituaries (“Why bother people?”). And many ambulance crews called that evening were not even informed when called what had happened...
Now, ten years later, such criminal behavior in front of the memory of the victims and their loved ones seems impossible, and this makes you feel a sense of bitter satisfaction. Times have come completely different, and we recognize ourselves as different people.
And then... There probably wasn’t a person in Moscow who didn’t touch on this topic in conversation at least once. But the officialdom did not want to notice anything. However, is this the first time night blindness has suddenly attacked all of us? Well, as far as I know, no one, even in our new society laced with glasnost, has ever suffered for the deliberate concealment of information.
It’s just that that evening, February 17, 1982, two granny cleaners were called. They covered the pools of blood with sawdust and then wiped them away. And with this, the authorities thought the memories of what happened could be completed. But a debt to memory? And what about the nightmares that still haunt two hundred people who were participants in the tragedy and survived?
How it was
Frankly, for me, even after getting acquainted with many documents and talking with many people, not everything is still clear. But let’s leave professional experts delving into the technical reasons. What we have left is the most valuable thing - eyewitness accounts. At the top, near the metro station, “they saw on that February evening, the same as today, approaches crowded with ambulances, police cordon, excited crowds of people: “What happened?!” Here, at the top, no one really knew anything yet knew. An accident in the subway, and that's all. The fewer answers people received, the more terrible pictures arose in their imaginations...
This morning began quite normally for the Aviamotornaya metro station. At five o'clock the duty officer inspected the station, the mechanics and those on duty at the escalators soon took their jobs. According to the instructions, test runs are required. By six o'clock passengers began to appear, but there was no influx. Escalator No. 4, the farthest one on the left side (if you go down), has not yet been turned on; we made do with others. By the way, metro commuters don’t say the word “escalator” in everyday life. They say: "car".
Rush hours passed without incident, all the cars worked properly, sleepy passengers, pushing each other, hurried to get to their shifts. The station staff worked until lunch and, replacing each other, ran out to have a snack. We also had to survive the evening rush hour, a nervous and tense time, even if everything was going as normal.
Then, as the investigation progresses, it will become clear who was doing what after lunch. And at the hour of the accident - every second... At 16.30 it was decided to turn on the fourth car in descent mode. At 4:40 p.m., the station attendant approached the person on duty at the escalator below. We found out: everything is fine everywhere. Fifteen minutes later, here, on Aviamotornaya, perhaps the most tragic scene in the entire history of the Moscow metro will happen - and it lasted only 110 seconds.
Witness LOROTEEVA I.Yu.: We stepped onto the escalator and managed to go down quite a bit, 5-8 meters, when the right handrail began to stop. Finally he froze completely. At the moment the handrail stopped, the escalator began to increase its speed. At the very bottom I will note that. the handrail was removed from the guide and hung as if it had been repaired...
Yes, yes, the death of people, chilling screams, pieces of human brain on the floor - it all started with a handrail that slipped off. Experts will later say that it broke due to insufficient rigidity and lack of means to control its tension. However, why did this handrail come off? I still didn’t get a definite answer.
What happened next?.. Here is the expert opinion, which will then be repeated in the court verdict:
“After the handrail came down, the locking device was activated and the main drive motor was turned off, and the activated service brake did not stop the staircase.” In other words, the miraculous staircase, accelerating its movement, not restrained by anything, but rather pushed by the mass of passengers on it, rushed down. Here are the feelings of the people who stood on its steps:
SHCHERBAKOV S.B.: Our escalator began to increase speed - I noticed this by the flashing of faces on the neighboring escalator.
When the people standing on this escalator noticed something was wrong, many rushed up, against the grain, but...
MARFIN A.M.: I also tried to run up, but the standing passengers interfered and eventually knocked me down. I only remember that my left hand got caught between the handrail and the steps, because the partitions were broken.
But the tragedy of the situation has not yet reached everyone.
SHNEIDERMAN A.M.: When our escalator began to increase speed, the passengers next to us smiled:
You'll get there faster! We flew the last part of the journey at tremendous speed. Right at the landing, my back was turned, and I fell into the rubble as fast as I could...
Everything flashed like in a movie.
KURSKY V.P.: I had this feeling: on the neighboring escalator (which also worked downwards) people went up...
KOROBOV V.A.: The speed of the escalator was so high that it was humming. This noise kept growing...
After the accident, experts will calculate that the speed of the “furious” escalator was two and a half times higher than normal. It took the passengers a few seconds to realize the danger of the situation in which they found themselves. The panic began. Those above heard the screams of people from below. Many tried to jump from the escalator onto the next one, or at least onto the plastic balustrade separating the escalators. Then it turns out that by all standards it had a coating that was too thin - 3 mm, which is why it broke, and people ended up in the resulting hole-trap. Someone couldn't resist and rolled on his back past the streetlights and down into chaos...
And down there, a bloody human mess was brewing. No, there was no huge gaping hole there, and no one fell into the underworld of mechanisms. But the enormous speed did not allow the passengers to jump onto the platform in time. One woman fell, followed by others... Someone didn’t have time to pull back his leg, and now someone’s boots were pulled under the metal comb in front of the platform, clothes and someone’s diplomats also fell there... The metal is twisting, and now and the escalator step rears up, cracks, followed by another. Then it turns out that... The destroyed stage is number 96. And the steps, unrestrained by nothing, are still rushing down, along with the people. Someone was lucky, he fell on the platform and managed to crawl away...
But where is the duty officer, the one sitting at the bottom of the escalator? It was he who was later made one of the “switchmen” in rumors: he was confused, he ran away... Everything was wrong, the duty officer turned out to be on the spot, and then the investigation had no complaints against him. Quite quickly it dawned on him that escalator No. 4 had “revolted.” I pulled the service brake handle on the remote control... The steps continued to roll down. Then he jumped out of his booth and rushed to the balustrade, to the emergency brake handle. The effect was the same: the emergency brake did not work...
GURKOV V.M. When the steps. where I was standing, they didn’t come out horizontally, and 5-6 people fell on me. Many fell on their backs. I was knocked down and fell on my back. I was dragged forward, I heard screams and the cracking of clothes being torn...
MIRONOV M. A.: I didn’t notice how I found myself in front of a crowd of passengers that had formed at the exit from the escalator. I flew into this pile at high speed and I don’t know how I got through it. I found myself at the bottom of the escalator steps. The step tore my back and tore my trousers. I remember how I lay on my back and was carried towards the metal teeth of the comb. My right foot fell under the balustrade, and I felt it break on the counter. The fracture was open, I felt the sharp edge of the bone...
A special story happened to the last witness: his right leg was caught between the exit platform and the step. When all this mechanical bacchanalia ended and they managed to remove the corpses of the dead and transport the wounded to hospitals, M. Mironov was still sitting in the same position, with his leg clamped. The metro workers had neither the means nor the mechanisms at hand to quickly free them. This was done only after two hours. This delay subsequently became the reason for the amputation of the leg...
All this is evidence of the living. The dead won't tell anymore.
When the duty officer from below was able to reach the escalator driver, he jumped out into the machine room and turned off the control circuit breaker. Only then did the unruly escalator freeze. Although there were very few people on it by that time.
In November 1982, at a meeting of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR, the exact number of victims was announced: eight dead, 30 people received injuries of varying severity.
But what exactly caused this accident with such terrible consequences? The court agreed with the experts' conclusions: the immediate technical cause of the accident was a malfunction of the service brake and the forced disablement of the emergency brake. In Russian terms, the reason turned out to be simple: one did not adjust the brake, the other did not check it in the morning before work, did not take measurements and test runs, two bosses formally checked their subordinates...
OK it's all over Now. Since then, the culprits named by the court managed to serve their sentences (I did not set out to name the names of the culprits in this material, the main thing was to tell how and what happened), the wounds of the cripples healed, the pain subsided in the memory... But the universal sin of silence remained about the tragedy. Let us name at least ten years later, on this sad anniversary, the names of our fellow countrymen who died that February evening at the Aviamotornaya metro station. And let it be, although belated, but still a tribute to them. Here are the names:
Ulybina Lidiya Kuzminichna, Pavlov Alexander Yuryevich, Skobeleva Alexandra Alekseevna, Uvarov Viktor Petrovich, Mulkidzhan Grigory Aleksandrovich, Komashko Larisa Ivanovna, Romanyuk Valentina Nikitichna, Kuzma Elizaveta Yuryevna.
The Moscow Metro administration did not want to talk to me about what happened or comment on the event: there was a court verdict, there was an investigation...
At about five o'clock in the evening on February 17, 1982, Muscovites who worked near the Aviamotornaya station were heading home. As always at this time, the metro was filled with people and the station attendant turned on the reserve escalator so as not to create a crowd. Less than half an hour later, one of the most tragic events in the entire history of the Moscow metro took place.
Due to a breakdown of the trolley mechanism, the stairs lost grip with the engine, and the escalator slid sharply down, picking up speed. The ladder rushed at a speed 2.5 times higher than normal.
People lost their balance and fell down, sliding down the steps and blocking the passage at the lower exit platform.
The total weight of the passengers on the escalator was 12 tons, and almost all of them formed a mountain of bodies at the bottom of the escalator in a few seconds.
The tragedy lasted 110 seconds. At 17.10 the entrance to the station was limited, at 17.35 it was blocked. Ten minutes later the station itself was closed, trains passed by without stopping. Ambulance teams were called to the station.
In the 1980s, newspapers didn't talk much about such things. The next day, only a few lines of notice were published in Evening Moscow: “On February 17, 1982, an escalator accident occurred at the Aviamotornaya station of the Kalinin radius of the Moscow metro. There are casualties among the passengers. The causes of the accident are being investigated."
But word of mouth worked great.
The city was filled with rumors about hundreds of dead who fell into the engine room located under the escalator and were torn apart by working mechanisms, about a station drenched in blood.
“It should be noted that the floor of Aviamotornaya is really paved with marble of a reddish hue, reminiscent of dried blood,” writes Matvey Grechko, author of the book “Secret Moscow Metro Lines in Schemes, Legends, Facts.” “Realizing that it is quite difficult to remove any contamination from porous marble, and completely forgetting that the floor of the station looked exactly the same as a year ago, Muscovites considered these “blood stains” as proof of the veracity of the most terrible gossip. Many, not wanting to walk through blood, began to avoid the strange station, and Aviamotornaya became deserted and deserted for a long time.”
A few months later, in April 1982, the newspaper “New Russian Word” very colorfully described what happened:
“According to eyewitnesses, as a result of a break in a crowded escalator, several hundred people fell into the mechanism that continued to rotate, dozens were crushed, and more than a hundred were maimed. All this happened in front of people moving on a parallel escalator. Panic arose among them, causing additional casualties: several people died in the crush.”
In reality, of course, no one was drawn into the mechanisms. People were injured and died in the resulting crush. Some passengers, trying to get out of it, climbed onto the balustrade. The thin, only 3 mm, plastic cladding could not stand it and collapsed, but underneath there were not terrible mechanisms that turned respectable citizens into bloody mincemeat, but stable concrete foundations. People who fell from a two-meter height received bruises, but remained alive.
Nine months later, at a meeting of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR, the exact number of victims was announced: 30 wounded and eight dead.
As investigators found out, the reason was the incorrect operation of the new brakes installed on Aviamotornaya escalators in December 1981. Metro employees, not familiar with the new requirements, regulated their work according to old instructions. As a result, the escalators operated in emergency mode for three months. During the accident, one of the steps broke, and as it passed the bottom ridge of the escalator, it deformed and destroyed it. The protection tripped and the electric motor turned off. But the emergency electromagnetic brake was able to develop the required braking torque only when the braking distance was more than 11 m. And the mechanical emergency brake did not work because the speed of the belt did not reach the threshold value.
A very difficult situation has arisen for the metro management. There have been numerous complaints about escalators of this series, and, of course, after the incident it was necessary to check all of them. But then almost two dozen stations would have to be closed, which would paralyze the work of the metro and lead to a scandal.
As a result, it was decided to close only Aviamotornaya. The repairs lasted three weeks and went on around the clock; teams of 70 people worked at the station in three shifts, seven days a week. At the remaining stations, escalators were repaired gradually, strengthening the steps, modernizing the brakes, changing the main drive shafts and balustrade panels.
4. Accidents and terrorist attacks
5. Transplants
Accident of escalators at Aviamotornaya in 1982
The second incident with human casualties in the Moscow metro occurred on February 17, 1982 at the Aviamotornaya station as a result of an escalator breakdown caused by design flaws and improper maintenance.
At approximately 16.30, due to an increase in passenger traffic, escalator No. 4 was turned on for descent. At about 5 p.m., the escalator's staircase, as it later turned out to be due to the escalator's trolley chains that had become detached from the engine holding them, suddenly began to accelerate and in just a few seconds reached a speed 2-2.4 times higher than the nominal speed. People on the escalator could not stay on their feet and fell, sliding down and blocking the exit from the lower platform. Some jumped onto the escalator balustrades to save themselves from falling. In less than two minutes, almost all the passengers on the escalator rolled down. 8 people died in the stampede, 30 people were injured, according to an announcement 9 months later, at a meeting of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR. At 17.10 the entrance to the station was limited, at 17.35 it was blocked, and at 17.45 the station was completely closed - trains passed through it without stopping.
The Moscow authorities chose to hide the scale of the incident; there was practically no information about the accident in the media. As a result, the city was flooded with rumors. In particular, a widely spread version was that the main number of deaths were passengers who fell “under the escalators” and were pulled into the mechanisms.
In the summer of 1982, during rush hour on Aviamotornaya, the escalator chain broke and people fell into the drive gears in the motor pit. The next day I was told about this by the reviewer of my thesis project, who got to the station 10 minutes later and saw blood and people with cut off legs... According to the then Soviet tradition, they did not write about this story, but now there are no memorial plaques there... I don’t know, maybe , is this an urban legend?
The plastic covering of the balustrade was indeed unable to withstand the weight of the people who jumped onto it, and people actually fell through it, but there are no mechanisms under the balustrade; people only received bruises from falling onto the concrete base of the escalator tunnel from a two-meter height. All the victims died as a result of a crush on the lower platform of the escalator.
As a result of the investigation, it turned out that in December 1981, service brakes of a new system were installed on four escalators at the Aviamotornaya station, requiring adjustment according to new specially developed instructions. However, the station's escalator operating foreman, V.P. Zagvozdkin, continued to adjust the brakes according to the old familiar scheme, neglecting the new instructions. Thus, for three months from the installation of the brake systems to the day of the disaster, all four escalators at the station were operated in emergency mode.
The immediate cause of the accident was a fracture in step No. 96. The damaged step when passing the lower landing of the escalator caused the destruction of the comb, the protection was activated and the electric motor was switched off. The activated electromagnetic service brake was able to develop the required braking torque much later than the set value; the braking distance was more than 11 meters. The mechanical emergency brake simply did not work, since the speed of the belt did not reach the threshold value, and there was simply no electrical circuit for monitoring the condition of the service brake in the escalators of this series.
The tragic experience was taken into account. From May 12 to May 28, 1982, the Aviamotornaya station was closed for repairs and modifications of escalators. Subsequently, urgently, but without closing the stations, all ET series escalators at the remaining metro stations were modified: the steps were strengthened, the brakes were modernized, the thickness of the balustrade cladding sheets was increased from 3 to 8-10 mm.
Terrorist attack at Tretyakovskaya stations on January 1, 1998
On January 1, 1998, an explosion occurred in the lobby of the Tretyakovskaya station. Three people were injured. The power of the shell-free explosive device was 150 grams of TNT. A shift driver of a metro train, crossing the pedestrian bridge from one train to another at Tretyakovskaya, discovered near the gate that closes the entrance to the station at night a small handbag that looked like a business card or cosmetic bag. Opening it, the driver saw batteries and wires. He immediately took the find to the person on duty at the platform, after which he boarded the train and left along the route. The duty officer, placing her purse on a metal box with a fire extinguisher on the far side of the platform, which is fenced off from the passenger hall, called the police. At that moment an explosion occurred. As a result of the explosion, the windows of the duty officer's cabin were broken; she was wounded by shrapnel, and two station cleaners who were nearby received minor injuries and nervous shock.
Power grid failure on May 25, 2005
The Moscow metro is facing the largest disruption in its history. On May 25 at 11:10, a massive shutdown of Mosenergo power centers began, supplying voltage including to the Metro line. As a result, 52 of the 170 Moscow metro stations were excluded from operation.
According to the Committee on Telecommunications and Media of the City of Moscow:
Traffic was partially absent on 3 lines of the Moscow Metro:
- Zamoskvoretskaya from the station. Krasnogvardeiskaya to st. Paveletskaya, including Kakhovskaya line
- Serpukhovsko-Timiryazevskaya from the station. Serpukhovskaya to st. Boulevard Dm. Donskoy
- Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya from the station. Bitsevsky Park to the station. Peace Avenue
There was no traffic at all on the Lyublinskaya line, as well as on the Butovskaya line of the light metro.
At 11:40, the evacuation of passengers from 27 trains in the tunnels began. At 13:15 the evacuation of passengers was completed.
According to other sources, a power outage led to the stoppage of trains on the Zamoskvoretskaya, Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya, Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya, Serpukhovsko-Timiryazevskaya, Butovskaya, Lyublinskaya, Kalininskaya and Kakhovskaya lines. According to these data, 43 trains stopped in the tunnels on different lines, containing about 20 thousand people.
Panic was avoided; the evacuation of passengers began 20-35 minutes after the accident. The downhill trains returned to the station, but most passengers still had to be evacuated on foot. The complete evacuation dragged on for almost two hours, while the capacity of the emergency generators in the metro was not always enough even to provide lighting at the stations plunged into complete darkness. The escalators stopped.
At interchange stations, some trains were also returned. For example, at Kitay-Gorod there was only one escalator, the entrance hall to Maroseyka for the exit, and the entrance to Solyanka for the entrance. There was no light on the slopes. After the situation at neighboring stations normalized, they were closed to entry and exit until the end of the day.
- De-energized stations photographs of eyewitnesses
Five o'clock in the evening, an ordinary Moscow weekday. Many had already finished work and were walking towards the metro.
ON THIS TOPIC
The Aviamotornaya station is located in the east of the city near large factories and industrial zones. Passenger traffic at the station on weekdays is usually high.
In order to cope with the increased influx of passengers, at 16:30 the station turned on escalator No. 4 for descent. People immediately filled its steps. It is worth noting that the escalators on Aviamotornaya are among the longest in the capital’s subway – 53 meters.
At about 5 p.m., the movement of the escalator stairs suddenly accelerated sharply. In five seconds it reached a speed 2.5 times higher than the standard speed. People standing on the escalator, many of whom were not even holding the handrail, lost their balance and began to fall to the lower landing.
One person flew down, then another; the clothes of the fallen began to be pulled under the metal comb. A huge crowd formed, people did not understand what was happening.
Those who were able to maintain their balance tried to jump onto the escalator balustrade - a dividing strip with lamps. But the thin plastic casing (only three millimeters) could not withstand the weight of the people who jumped onto it. Passengers fell through it and fell from a two-meter height onto the concrete base of the escalator tunnel, many received injuries of varying severity.
The tragedy lasted about two minutes, during which time about 100 people rolled down. The escalator attendant did everything possible to help people, but was powerless. He tried to stop the car with the service brake from the remote control in his booth, but in vain. Turning on the emergency brake didn't help either.
At 17:10 the entrance to Aviamotornaya was limited, 25 minutes later it was blocked, and at 17:45 the station was completely closed. Trains passed through it without stopping.
Later, the investigation found out that several months before the tragedy, service brakes of a new system were installed on four Aviamotornaya escalators. The mechanisms needed adjustments according to the new instructions. But one of the operation masters continued to configure them in the old way.
It turns out that for several months since the installation of new brake systems, the escalators were operated in emergency mode, and Aviamotornaya passengers were in danger every day. Someday the mechanisms were bound to break down anyway.
The cause of the accident lay in the fracture of step 96. When passing the lower platform of the escalator, the damaged step gradually destroyed the comb, as a result, the protection worked and the electric motor turned off. The activated brake developed the required braking torque much later than the required time, but the mechanical emergency brake did not work at all.
Despite the fact that in 1982 the capital’s population exceeded eight million people, news of the tragedy instantly spread throughout the city. The press, meanwhile, pointedly ignored what happened in accordance with instructions from above. Only Vechernyaya Moskva provided a small note: the location of the incident, the number of dead and wounded were indicated.
According to official data, eight people were killed and 30 passengers were injured of varying degrees of severity. But the hushing up of the tragedy, as often happens, led to the emergence of various rumors.
It was rumored that people fell straight into the engine room. And the victims, the whisperers said, were not eight people, but almost a hundred. Allegedly eyewitnesses of the tragedy wandered around the city, escalating the situation, describing in all colors the horrors of what happened at Aviamotornaya. Some of them were detained by the police for violating public order.
The almost complete silence of party officials was also due to the fact that a delegation from New York was supposed to arrive in the city in the very near future. Therefore, the capital of the USSR had to be shown to Western guests as a prosperous city. The tragedy at Aviamotornaya clearly did not fit into the constructed mythology of “developed socialism.”
About 38 years ago, at the Aviamotornaya station of the Moscow metro, several dozen people were injured and killed due to an escalator accident.
The worst accident in the history of the Moscow metro occurred where no one expected it. On February 17, 1982, one of the escalator handrails broke off at the Aviamotornaya station. As a result, the adhesion of the staircase parts to the electric motor was lost, and the entire structure, under the weight of people, rushed down, rapidly picking up speed. In fact, to prevent such situations, escalators are also equipped with emergency brakes. One main and one spare. On that ill-fated day, both did not work.
As far as I understand, when descending the escalator is slowed down by an electric motor, which switches to generator mode. This creates a small power plant to save energy, and the automatic motor control maintains a uniform speed of the escalator (0.75-1.0) m/s.
At 16:30, due to the beginning influx of passengers returning from work, the ill-fated escalator at the Aviamotornaya station was turned on for descent. The escalator operated without passengers for several minutes - this is according to the instructions. Soon the escalator was opened and the first passengers stepped onto the stairs. Fifteen minutes later, as a result of a breakdown, the escalator began to move downwards under the weight of people, picking up speed.
The escalator's staircase reached a speed 2.5 times higher than the nominal speed; about a hundred people were unable to stay on their feet and began to fall, blocking the passage in the lower exit area. In a few seconds, almost all the passengers on the escalator rolled down.
The tragedy lasted 110 seconds. The escalator attendant did everything in his power, but was powerless. Noticing the abnormal movement of the ladder, he tried to stop the car with the service brake from the remote control in his cabin, but to no avail. Jumping out of the cab, the duty officer rushed to the balustrade to apply the emergency brake, but this did not help... At 17:10, the entrance to the station was limited, at 17:35 it was blocked, and ten minutes later the station was completely closed. Trains passed the Aviamotornaya station without stopping. Ambulance teams were called to the station.
After this tragedy, rumors circulated in Moscow for a long time about the painful death of people who tried to jump out of the rushing stairs, broke through the plastic balustrade and fell onto the rotating gears of the cars. Fortunately, the bloody meat grinder turned out to be just a figment of human imagination.
In reality, of course, no one was drawn into the mechanisms. People were injured and died in the resulting crush. Some passengers, trying to get out of it, climbed onto the balustrade. The thin, only 3 mm, plastic lining could not stand it and broke, but underneath there were not terrible mechanisms that turned respectable citizens into bloody mincemeat, but stable concrete foundations. The people who fell from a two-meter height received bruises, but all remained alive.
In the 1980s, newspapers didn't talk much about such things. The next day, only a few lines of notice were published in Evening Moscow: “On February 17, 1982, an escalator accident occurred at the Aviamotornaya station of the Kalinin radius of the Moscow metro. There are casualties among the passengers. The causes of the accident are being investigated." Only nine months later, at a meeting of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR, the exact number of victims was announced: 8 dead and 30 wounded.
As investigators found out, the reason was the incorrect operation of new brakes installed on the escalators of the Aviamotornaya station in December 1981. Metro employees, not familiar with the new requirements, regulated their work according to old instructions. As a result, the escalators operated in emergency mode for three months. During the accident, one of the steps broke, and as it passed the bottom ridge of the escalator, it deformed and destroyed it. The protection tripped and the electric motor turned off. But the emergency electromagnetic brake was able to develop the necessary braking torque only when the speed of the escalator reached a speed of more than 2.5 m/s. But the mechanical emergency brake did not work because the belt speed did not reach the threshold value.
A very difficult situation has arisen for the metro management. There have been numerous complaints about escalators of this series, and, of course, after the incident it was necessary to check all of them. But then almost two dozen stations would have to be closed, which would paralyze the work of the metro and lead to a scandal.
As a result, it was decided to close only Aviamotornaya. The repairs lasted three weeks and went on around the clock; teams of 70 people worked at the station in three shifts, seven days a week. At the remaining stations, escalators were repaired gradually, strengthening the steps, modernizing the brakes, changing the main drive shafts and balustrade panels.
P.S. I remembered this horror after the tragedy that occurred on an escalator in the Rome subway. The Italians make the balustrade strong. Not a single CSKA fan failed. Maybe now everyone is taking into account the experience of the tragedy of the Aviamotornaya metro station?
I didn’t know about the tragedy at the Aviamotornaya station from the newspapers. I studied nearby at the institute. The scariest story I've ever heard is "People were counted by their hats."
