(December 23, 1985) - Two days before Christmas, in the very busy Sunvalley Mall, a beechcraft aircraft crashed straight into the Macy's roof. It exploded killing the two passengers and pilot, and rained burning fuel and plane parts onto the shoppers below.
Panic ensued as people ran for the doors, and others tried to help the injured. Every ambulance was called to the scene. The accident ended up injuring 83 people, and fatally wounding four others, besides those in the plane.
It caused an uproar in the community, given the close proximity of the airport (Buchanan Field) to the mall. But both still exist today in Concord.
(January 24, 2012) - At the Galleria Shopping Mall in South Africa, a six-year old girl gets her foot caught in the mall escalator, while walking barefoot. Surgeons had to remove three toes and part of her foot.
When her foot got stuck, her mother says that another woman hit the emergency stop button, but nothing happened. She blames the mall for the incident, but the mall spokeswoman (Swastika Juggernath), says there are signs everywhere stating not to walk barefoot.
My only comment is... Swastika Juggernath? Really?! Yes, that's her real name. She really needs to be a super-villain. Hell, maybe she is.
(June 21, 2013) - While shopping at a grocery store in Shanghai, China, an older woman is exiting a ramp escalator when a runaway cart, full of groceries, rams into her and slams her into a wall 20ft. away. She dies at the hospital later that day.
In the video you can see she has no idea anything is barreling behind her. I have to assume the man whose cart it belonged to, wasn't aware that his cart had gotten away from him, or it happened so fast, he didn't have time to yell out to her. The heavy items in his cart (reported to be crates of drinks), combined with the moving walkway, and extreme angle, created a battering-ram.
I'm not a physics expert, which you are about to find out. I'm going to guess the cart at the bottom was traveling about 8 feet per second. Based on the number of steps her, and the man to the right were walking. This converts to 2.4384 meters per second. Which converts to 5.5mph. And a case of 24 cans of soda weighs about 20 pounds. But who knows what exactly was in the cart.
Which gives a ballpark estimate that she was hit by 200-250 pounds of metal going 5-6mph.
In America, shoppers aren't allowed to bring carts onto escalators. And some escalators have locking devices that keep the wheels in place, to keep these accidents from happening.
Escalators are a source of many freak accidents. They seem benign, but they can actually cause great harm, when people are not paying attention.
Ira Zepp explains that malls are mini cosmos,self-contained worlds, cosmic ‘centers’, and this is evi-denced by their typically quadrilateral design and the frequency of words like ‘center’ and ‘crossings’ in their names (e.g. “Rivertown Crossings” and “CenterpointMall”).
The intended effect of the shopping mall is to create a sacred space and time in which ‘big picture’questions and the outside world become irrelevant. InThe Malling of America, William Kowinski writes,“Whatever you actually came here for is in the distant past. You’ve been floating here . . . for hours. But that’s the whole idea of this psychological structure: to turn off your mind and let you float . . . .”.
But will malls last? Do they have a future? Google doesn't seem to think so:
I'm fascinated by these tiny cities, and the events that happen inside their walls. Which is why I've made 'Mall accidents' my first category of freak accidents.
