"Acceptance" less than half a year, Yunnan net red food market in the deadly elevator

At noon on October 18, Ms. Huang, as usual, was going to the vegetable market to buy some lotus roots. She is from Maitreya City, Yunnan Province. The vegetable market she wants to go to is the Fodu Shopping Mall in the old city of Maitreya, which was originally the largest farmer's market in Maitreya, Hongfeng Vegetable Market. After the shed reform in 2014, the current four-story mall was built at the original site of the vegetable market, which opened in 2015. The first floor sells vegetables and fruits, the second floor sells dry tea, the third floor sells shoes and clothing, and the top floor of the fourth floor is a market. Every Wednesday and Saturday, vendors gather in the streets and there are many kinds of goods.

Because the entire commercial complex is located in a prosperous area and has a huge volume, some people call it a "5-star vegetable market".Also because of its distinctive features, in recent years, the name of the commercial capital of Focheng is often listed on the list of Yunnan characteristic online red vegetable markets. However, in public comments, it can almost be seen that foreign tourists clock in at the vegetable market every day.

Vegetable market entrance, red star news live screenshot

Ms. Huang said that locals also like to buy vegetables here, especially the market on the fourth floor, where in addition to fixed stores, there are also large mobile stalls for locals to sell their own agricultural products, including fungi and fried bee pupae that cannot be bought on the first floor, "the price is also cheaper". Like most people, Ms. Huang usually goes straight to the 4th floor when she goes to the commercial capital of Focheng.

But on October 18, as soon as she parked her car outside the mall, she heard a huge "bang" coming from the mall ". She thought there was an explosion, but the vegetable merchant on the first floor quickly told her that the goods ladder had fallen and there were still people inside. Ms. Huang knows which one the merchant is referring.

Because the whole market is located in the first phase of the Fo city commercial capital, the overall average daily traffic volume reaches 2-30000 people, but there is only one escalator on each floor, and only to the third floor. In addition to the step ladder, there are several car elevators that can lead to the market on the fourth floor with the largest flow of people. ms Huang remembers that the car of the accident is the largest, which can accommodate the three-wheeled trailer of vegetable vendors. beside it are two smaller elevators, especially the one marked as a passenger elevator. the car is very narrow, with no more than a few people standing and only about half the width of the small freight elevator.

Therefore, although the goods ladder is posted outside the "goods ladder is not allowed to carry people" sign, but in fact, most of the people up and down, or through the goods ladder.The market obviously acquiesced in this practice, because Ms. Huang remembered that there was a staff member in a security uniform in the freight elevator who sat on a chair everyday and was responsible for helping passengers press the floor button. She often blocked the door with a fly swatter or a wooden stick when the elevator door was about to close, so that passengers could get in quickly.

Ms. Huang came to Buddha City almost every day to buy vegetables. She noticed it a long time ago,When taking this elevator, there will be a very special slight shock, "I have never experienced it in other elevators", and when the elevator is going down, she often hears "the sound of hitting the iron chain", which is also in other elevators. I haven't heard it before.However, when she saw that the inside of the freight elevator was bright and not shabby, she didn't pay much attention to it.

If I had entered the mall earlier on the 18th, Ms. Huang might have stepped into the elevator as usual. According to comprehensive media and official reports, the elevator suddenly stalled and fell into the negative first floor when it reached the second floor. The scene after the incident showed that the iron sheet above the freight elevator had been bent. Another merchant said that all the victims, except for a female merchant, were customers. The merchant was about 50 years old and lived in a stockade near Maitreya. She rented a shop to sell vegetables in the market on the fourth floor, because her husband usually worked at home. Most of the time, she was alone guarding the vegetable shop.

October 18 was a busy street day, but Ms. Huang did not dare to go upstairs again, but looked at the freight elevator from the first floor. About 10 minutes later, she remembers, ambulances and the fire brigade arrived and began carrying the wounded into the car.

On October 21, on the next street day, when Ms. Huang and her family went to the commercial capital of Fo City again, they found that a cordon had been set up outside the freight elevator in the accident, and the passenger elevator on the side was also suspended. She went up the step ladder to the fourth floor and found that the entrance to the market was blocked and many vendors had withdrawn. However, this newspaper called other floors of the city's commercial capital and said they were still operating normally.

Ms. Huang, who almost witnessed the accident with her own eyes, still has lingering fears, "too horrible to take the elevator".

In fact, the accident was extreme. A number of elevator industry practitioners told this newspaper, based on the elevator itself safety device,If the maintenance system and annual inspection system are strictly observed, it is rare for the elevator to suddenly fall to the end. "It is more common that the elevator door fails or falls a little, but it can stop quickly".

According to the official statement of Maitreya City, the load of the freight elevator in the accident was 3 tons. According to media reports, there were 21 people in the freight elevator at the time of the accident. Even according to the standard of 75kg per capita, the total was only about 1.6 tons. After eliminating the cause of overload, a sales manager of a state-owned elevator manufacturer who has been working for 7 years speculated that the cause of the accident may be that the freight elevator, which was used very little frequently, was used as a shopping mall passenger elevator,"Normal freight elevators do not operate all the time, but the passenger elevators in shopping malls are always up and down until the shopping malls are closed. The frequency is greatly increased, which directly increases the risk of accidents".

Why does the increase in frequency of use increase the risk of accidents? Akai (pseudonym), who has been an elevator maintenance officer in Hong Kong for 26 years, told this newspaper that from the perspective of operation principle, elevators are mainly divided into hydraulic elevators and traction elevators. The former pushes the engine room from below, while the latter pulls from above. Among them, hydraulic elevators have large energy consumption and are not environmentally friendly, and have been reduced in use in recent years. Therefore, the mainstream elevators on the market are traction type, and traction elevators have two different steel cable design structures, one is a moving pulley structure with reverse rope pulley; One is a fixed pulley without reverse rope pulley.

According to the internal map of the elevator after the fall released by the media, Akai analyzed that the accident cargo elevator was a steel cable structure with anti-rope wheels. "Under this structure, the fall of the car (I. e. the elevator room) may be due to the fact that the bearing on the anti-rope wheel was not properly maintained, and there were problems such as lack of oil and rust, which were eventually worn off, causing the wire rope to separate from the car, and the car lost traction and fell off," Akai said.

"The bearing is definitely not worn out at once, it takes time. If there is a problem with such a key component as the anti-rope wheel, it can be found by daily maintenance," Akai said. According to China's Special Equipment Safety Supervision Regulations, elevators should be cleaned, lubricated, adjusted and inspected at least once every 15 days. In other words, at least 2 times a month maintenance. "Maintenance is carried out in strict accordance with the inspection item list, and the standards are very clear. There is no situation where the problem is not serious. For example, the diameter of the steel wire rope must be stuck at 98% (the diameter of the worn steel wire rope cannot be less than 98% of the initial diameter). If it is less than this value, the whole steel wire rope must be replaced without discussion".

Akai said, and therefore,Problems with bearings and wire ropes are extremely rare. Even if they do, the elevator still has the last bumper-speed limiter and safety gear.Just like the emergency braking of a car, the speed limiter transmits a signal to the controller through electrical contacts and drops the brake when the elevator is overspeeding. At the same time, after the wire rope of the speed limiter is lifted, the safety gear will be activated to lock the car firmly on the guide rail to prevent it from falling further. Therefore, in the 26 years of Akai's career, he has never heard of such a serious car fall accident.

"It can fall directly to the end, indicating that the speed limiter and safety gear are completely invalid, which may be due to rust or other mechanical reasons," Akai said. However, it is reasonable to say that the speed limiter should be subjected to a load test every 5 years and a no-load test every 1 year, which should be carried out by professional licensed personnel,"If there is a problem with the speed limiter, it will definitely be found in the annual inspection".

According to the Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture Emergency Management Bureau, the freight ladder involved was registered with the relevant departments in August 2015. The latest test was in May 2023, and the test results were all qualified. Akai was puzzled by the result. "It is almost impossible to break it in 5 months. There must be a problem before then,Besides, there are problems with wire ropes, bearings, speed limiters, and safety gear at the same time, and they have not been discovered, "this probability is too small".

According to Hongxing News, the safety wiring personnel of the elevator in Fo Cheng Shangdu said that the manufacturer and the maintenance company involved in the accident were all an elevator company limited by shares, and the inspection agency was Zhejiang Intercity Special Equipment Inspection Co., Ltd. Among them, the elevator co., ltd. was fined in March this year for maintaining an elevator for too long. the specific punishment example is that the first and last maintenance time in the paper version of the maintenance record are may 2022 and September 2022 respectively, while the information registered on the mobile phone APP shows that there was only one maintenance record in January 2023, with an interval of 3 months respectively.

After the accident in the commercial capital of Buddha City, many people began to worry about the maintenance of elevators. Zuo Kun (pseudonym), the manager of a state-owned elevator manufacturer who has been working for 7 years, told this newspaper that elevator maintenance is generally carried out by the elevator management party (such as a shopping mall) as Party A, and the maintenance unit is paid as Party B for daily maintenance. Zuo Kun said that at present, there are generally three mainstream maintenance methods, including cleaning the package (only checking but not replacing), half package (checking and replacing some parts), and full package (checking and replacing all parts),However, most businesses will choose the cheapest bag cleaning, that is, the maintenance unit is only responsible for daily inspection and maintenance. If elevator parts need to be replaced, the shopping mall will purchase them and find someone to install them.

According to the the People's Republic of China Special equipment Safety Law, after the elevator is put into use, the elevator manufacturing unit shall put forward suggestions for improvement and provide necessary technical assistance for the problems existing in the maintenance and safe operation of the elevator maintenance unit or user unit, and provide necessary technical assistance; when the elevator is found to have serious hidden dangers of accidents, it shall promptly inform the elevator user and report to the department responsible for the safety supervision and management of special equipment.

that is to say,The production unit should not only be responsible for the safety of the elevator, but also bear the obligation to inform the user of the risk in time and supervise the improvement.In this elevator accident, both the elevator production unit and the maintenance unit are Attenborough. Zuo Kun said that in this case, when Attenborough found problems during maintenance, it had to be reported to the store management personnel and asked to sign. "If it is a small part problem, such as elevator display panel, button, etc., it can still be handled by the store, but if it is a large key part, for example, steel cables, guide rails, hosts, etc., Attenborough must promptly inform the store of the risks and require them to be replaced. If the store insists on not listening, it can send an official letter directly to them. If the store still does not respond, Attenborough should directly lock the elevator and stop the use of the elevator".

but zuo kun mentioned,In the actual process, as the maintenance unit of Party B and as the elevator user mall of Party A, the right to speak on whether to replace the elevator parts is not equal.Judging from Zuo Kun's dealings with shopping malls, "Some shopping malls already know that there is a problem with whether to replace parts, but in order to save money, or because they feel that it is not important, they can slow down, so they have been dragging it out. change. As a maintenance company, Party A cannot be replaced without skipping Party A. Moreover, some maintenance companies are afraid of losing customers, dare not take measures to lock the ladder, and dare not report upward. This is full of potential safety hazards."

The maintenance unit of the Maitreya City Commercial Capital Elevator is the elevator manufacturer mentioned above, and the user is the property manager of the commercial capital of the city, Maitreya Jisheng Commercial Management Co., Ltd. The company is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yunnan Jicheng Holding Group. Prior to this, after the Maitreya Municipal Government formally proposed the goal of creating a national sanitary city in 2015, Yunnan Jicheng took over the "upgrading and transformation" of Hongfeng Farmer's Market ".

In addition, as opposed to the major safety responsibility of maintenance, the maintenance workload exceeds the standard.Zuo Kun said that the best amount of maintenance for a maintenance worker in a month is less than 40 elevators, but in most companies in the industry, a maintenance worker is basically responsible for hundreds of elevators a month, and sometimes he has to go out in the middle of the night to rescue trapped people and be on call 24 hours a day. At the same time, the monthly maintenance performance of an elevator is often only a few dozen yuan. "the monthly salary in third-and fourth-tier cities is 2000 or 3000, and that in first-tier cities may be capped at about 8000 yuan".

At the same time, elevator maintenance is also a risky industry. According to the official website of the People's Government of Haidian District, Beijing, in August 2022, there were 3 consecutive accidents related to elevator repair operations in Beijing, which was the squeeze of the car and the shaft., Resulting in the death of 3 maintenance personnel.

Zuo Kun believes that the superposition of these factors has led to the high mobility and lack of professional quality of maintenance personnel. "A maintenance personnel should have been responsible for this elevator, just like the supervisor of a building, but this responsibility system has not been established. Some maintenance personnel may just glance at the car and leave with a card during maintenance, impersonate Party A to sign and upload to the supervision system".

For the supervision and maintenance of the city supervision bureau, an elevator to check once a year, check but to re-check, "this kind of inspection is to offer external third parties, time is difficult to say, about to spend money to eat and entertain, this is the cost. Supervision sometimes for the sake of convenience, will also turn a blind eye", Zuo Kun said.

Source: Sanlian Life Weekly

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