(China) Woman is killed by a Shopping Cart

(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.

Sources:
http://www.ibtimes.com/runaway-shopping-cart-kills-woman-shanghai-supermarket-video-1319993
http://sandrarose.com/2013/06/woman-killed-by-runaway-shopping-cart/