You may not think of the elevator industry as a particularly interesting business, but you'd be wrong. My pal Nick Paumgarten has written a fascinating piece on elevators in this week's New Yorker which included this graf:

Nonetheless, elevators are extraordinarily safe - far safer than cars, to say nothing of other forms of vertical transport. Escalators are scary. Statistics are elusive ("Nobody collects them," Edward Donoghue, the managing director of the trade organization National Elevator Industry, said), but the claim, routinely advanced by elevator professionals, that elevators are ten times as safe as escalators seems to arise from fifteen-year-old numbers showing that, while there are roughly twenty times as many elevators as escalators, there are only a third more elevator accidents.

The reason I highlight this particular graf is because of this story in today's New York Daily News:

Mets fan dies in escalator fall at Shea

BY TANANGACHI MFUNI, MARK LELINWALLA and ETHAN ROUEN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Updated Wednesday, April 16th 2008, 1:37 AM

A 37-year-old Mets fan and father of two plunged to his death in a horrifying accident at Shea Stadium Tuesday night, police and witnesses said.

Antonio Narainasami of Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, fell four stories over the side of an escalator on the mezzanine level - in view of his daughters, Emily, 14, and Anjali, 8, relatives said.

Kevin Prashad, 28, a cousin of Narainasami's who attended the game with him, said the accident occurred on an escalator that wasn't running as the family left the game about 10 p.m.

"He was walking down the escalator holding the hand railing," Prashad said. "He lost his footing."

I'm still not clear as to how losing one's footing on an escalator that wasn't moving could result in hurtling over the side, especially since the man reportedly had not been drinking and was not horsing around when the accident occurred.

I guess escalators really are scary.