‘No record’ of person falling into train platform gap, Hong Kong airport says after reports child slipped
Hong Kong Free Press
Hong Kong’s airport has said it had no record of anybody falling through a gap between a train and platform on its premises, after media reported an incident last year involving a child allegedly slipping through the crevice before being rescued.
In a statement on Thursday night, the Airport Authority said it had already conducted an investigation upon receiving enquiries from the authorities in January. The Airport Authority said a staff member reported that some passengers had mentioned a shoe dropping into the gap between the train and the platform at Terminal 1 last November, but that “no record of persons having fallen into the gap was found.”
The Airport Authority’s comments came after media outlets reported on Thursday that a child had slipped through a gap last November while entering an automated people mover, a train that takes travellers between different parts of the airport.
Oriental Daily, which was the first to report the alleged incident, published screenshots of CCTV footage showing a young girl boarding the train. In one frame, a pair of hands appears to be clinging onto the floor of the train, and in another, a woman is seen squatting down.
The Airport Authority said in its statement that it had enquired with staff and checked records as part of its investigation after being asked by the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department (EMSD), and that there had been no such incident of a passenger falling into the gap.
The Authority added that CCTV footage of the alleged incident had already been deleted by the time the EMSD made enquiries as recordings are only kept for one month due to privacy and operational needs.
In response to HKFP’s enquiries, Ng Yuk-wa, a technical secretary at the EMSD, said on Friday it was not aware of the three incidents until it received anonymous emails in January and July.
She said the two incidents that happened this year did not require reporting under the mechanism, but that the department had urged the Airport Authority to improve its communication.
Regarding the incident involving the child, Ng said the department was informed via an anonymous tip off in January. After reviewing the information submitted by the Airport Authority in response to its enquiry, the department was unable to ascertain the incident.
The department has now reopened investigation based on the new footage that has come to light, she added.
Staff were aware, lawmaker says
The alleged incident of the child falling through the gap was one of three reported by Oriental Daily on Thursday. None of the incidents had been made public.
The Airport Authority also responded to the other two incidents. Regarding one involving damage to a railway intersection point in January, the authority said staff “reported and recommended inspection of the concrete base of a point switch” during a routine check.
In relation to another incident, in which sparks were seen at the tail of a train, the authority said small pieces of “metal-coated paper” falling onto the track caused “slight and very brief sparks.” Train operations were unaffected, it added.
The Airport Authority said none of the three incidents had to be reported to the EMSD per the regulations for its reporting mechanism. But lawmaker Michael Tien, who chaired the Kowloon-Canton Railway Corporation before it merged with the MTR, challenged this claim in a Chinese Facebook post on Friday.
He said the principle should be to overreport rather than to underreport, and to let the EMSD decide whether the incidents had posed a safety risk. Tien also questioned the deletion of CCTV footage, asking how management could review incidents without it.
Lawmaker and former railway engineer Gary Zhang said there may have been attempts to hide the incident involving the child. He said it was not the case that the video was filmed just by a passerby.
“We can see from the video that the footage was clearly from a CCTV system. It is from the airport’s own CCTV system, proving that there were staff who were aware of it at the time,” he told reporters in Cantonese on Thursday.
The Airport Authority said it would look into the incident involving the child allegedly falling into the platform gap again, and that it would it submit a report to the EMSD within one month.
HKFP has reached out to the EMSD for comment.
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