Tragic news out of Hokkaido, Japan, where a 5-year-old boy died after his right arm was trapped in a moving walkway at a ski resort on Sunday, December 28th.
According to Japan’s Kyodo News, the boy’s mother called firefighters around 10am saying that he was trapped in the moving walkway in Otaru, Hokkaido. The victim lived in Sapporo, a nearby major city.
The boy had fallen has he was attempting to get off the walkway which connects the parking lot and the ski slopes. Resort officials state that the emergency stop function did not operate automatically as it was supposed to, forcing the mother to press the stop button.
Typically the emergency function automatically stops the walkway if a foreign object is caught. It had apparently worked during a routine earlier in the day. As staff were unable to free the boy, emergency workers were forced to dismantle part of the machine to free him.
Our deepest thoughts and condolences are with the friends an family of the child at this time.
