said<\/a>. A technician reset the escalator after the American delegation reached the second floor, he added.<\/p>\nFor two escalator experts that Morning Edition spoke to, the takeaway is simple: If the U.N. explanation is correct, the machinery did what it was designed to do.<\/p>\n
How escalators are designed <\/p>\n
Escalators are moving staircases powered by chains and gears. Like elevators, they undergo regular inspections and are built with emergency features to shut down when something goes wrong.<\/p>\n
Robert Rauch, a Florida-based elevator inspector with more than three decades of experience, said: “An escalator should not break down, as long as it’s being maintained properly. But however, there are many safety micro switches in the entire unit that would stop the escalator in certain circumstances, and that’s how they are designed. That’s what they’re there for. They’re there for safety reasons.”<\/p>\n
Those switches can be triggered by obstructions, heavy loads, or shoes getting caught in the comb plate. “They could get caught in a comb tooth, and for safety reasons, there’s micro switches that will stop the escalator, just for that reason. So somebody doesn’t get injured or has a foot cut,” Rauch said.<\/p>\n
Safety features may have led to the stoppage at the U.N. <\/p>\n
Richelle McCaskill-Diaz, who has worked on elevators and escalators for about 30 years, said the stoppage showed the system may have worked as intended.<\/p>\n
“An escalator that’s well maintained should not expect breakdowns,” McCaskill-Diaz said. “All the safety features that would shut off an escalator usually are [there] to prevent a disaster from happening.”<\/p>\n
She said escalators have have what is called a comb impact switch that is meant to stop an escalator and prevent it from moving forward if something is stuck in it.<\/p>\n
“If, in fact, somebody had tripped or had actuated the comb impact switch and it stopped, it did exactly as it was intended to do,” she said.<\/p>\n
Rauch agreed that if something triggered the upper comb impact switch, it could indeed shut off the escalator.<\/p>\n
He added that, from seeing the video, “it did not look like a very hard stop at all.”<\/p>\n
But Rauch noted he understands why a sudden stop would startle somebody on an escalator, especially if they were “not holding on to the handrail properly, or their weight was not balanced, perfectly.”<\/p>\n
The radio version of this story was edited by Adam Bearne and produced by Kaity Kline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Technicians at U.N. headquarters inspect the escalator that stalled as President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump rode…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":170865,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,134,427],"class_list":{"0":"post-170864","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}