An elevator is a platform, either enclosed or open, designed to lift freight to higher floors inside a building. Elevators tend to be a uniform element of any tall residential or commercial building, and have even made their way into homes.
But since elevators are a vehicle of the masses, they are automatically prone to accidents, some of which can be gruesome. This raises the question: How dangerous are they? The answer might surprise you. As it turns out, elevators are actually safer than stairs!
In the US, elevators make 18 billion passenger-filled trips every year, as per ConsumerWatch.com. The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Consumer Product Safety Commission projects that all those yearly elevator malfunctions lead to around 27 deaths on average. Not surprisingly, a majority of people at risk are the mechanics whose job is to fix those faulty elevators. As calculated by the LA Times, elevator fatality rate rounds of to 0.00000015% per trip in general. This percentage is even lower when it comes to the general public.
On the other hand, approximately 1,600 people succumb to death or debilitating injuries after falling down the stairs, as per data collected from the Center for Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics.
Question: death on stairs 1600.
ReplyDeleteAt home, or at the office when people decide to use stairs instead of elevators?'
I think this is a typical misuse of numbers, something like "gun deaths 100, of which 99 were suicides". "GUNS USED IN VIOLENT CRIMES, BAN GUNS"
What I want to see is the same comparison of injuries/deaths for stairs, elevaors AND escalators.
ReplyDeleteEscalators - the mechanical stairs that chop people's legs up.