Big accident at Wonderfest Tokyo today (pictures and video)!

[fotjp]

I went to Tokyo Wonderfest Winter 2008 today at Tokyo Big Sight. This is the big Japanese figure / model show held twice a year. Last year, I posted pictures of one of 2007's Wonder Fest shows in the Japan Forum gallery.

I went today and the big news is that there was an accident where 50 people were injured!

Usually, Japan is very safe, but in this case, the escalator apparently couldn't handle the load of all of the people entering WonderFest and it started to reverse direction.

Here is a picture of the police and medics treating some people (picture from Gigazine):


And here are some videos of the escalator reversing direction and sending people backwards down into the crowd of people waiting to go up. From what I read, I guess it wasn't able to take the weight of the people, so it reversed or slid backwards. When the people on the escalator started going back down (when they should have been going up), some of them fell and others were sent by the escalator down into the crowd at the bottom of the escalator, causing a lot of injuries, including at least one person with broken bones. All of that according to reports on other websites.

Here is one video of the accident. The escalator on the left side should be going up, but instead it's going down:


Another WonderFest Tokyo accident video:


There are more videos and pictures of the accident scene at Wonder Festival at the Japanese language site Gigazine.

After the injuries were dealt with, the show went on and things eventually got back to normal with the exception of the escalator going up to the top floors being out of service. Because of that, I only took pictures on the bottom floors this time. The top floors were still open, but you had to walk up several flights of stairs and the line to get up the stairs was really long and slow moving. I will post the pictures of the figures, models, and toys later. For now I just wanted to report on the accident for those of you that aren't in Tokyo.

[fotjp]

Here is NHK Japanese television news about the accident.
NHK - Wonder Festival Accident Video