Industry news roundup: week ended 15 July 2013:
Public transport can be a pain, but it can be positively dangerous to your health as well; nowhere is it more dangerous than in London!
At least that’s what it looks like if a recent Freedom of Information request can be believed, as it came out this week that the London Underground has seen so many accidents over the past four years that it’s had to pay out on £2.5 million in personal injury compensation to thousands of injured tube riders. There were some 3,471 injuries last year alone – an increase of some 200 over 2011 figures, according to the information – with the most common occurrences being trips and falls.
You should be especially careful if you get on or off at Kings Cross St Pancras as well, as this station has the dubious honour of being the most dangerous. Transport for London received 147 passenger injury reports in 2012, making it the clear ‘winner;’ from 2009 to last year there were a total of 661 reported injuries in all.
Budget cuts have been the culprit, according to the Road Transport Union, as stations with skeleton crews simply can’t keep up with the maintenance needs of a massive railway network like the Underground. I wonder if it would have been cheaper to simply pay the salaries of a few more railway workers instead of paying out on such an enormous number of accident claims over the past four years!
It’s not just passengers that need to watch their necks, either; the few railway workers left are also experiencing some rather serious injuries whilst on the job. In fact i read about how a 32 year old railway worker that was severely burnt in an explosion has ended up with a massive settlement after he was left in the burn unit for an excruciating 10 weeks.
The poor man suffered 30 per cent burns to not just his upper body but his face as well, causing severe injuries and limiting his ability to breathe and speak. He also has ended up with poor movement in his right hand due to numbness and is now permanently disfigured as well, all because he had been working on a power cable that hadn’t been isolated properly and was actually coursing with electricity.
Can you imagine the pain and suffering this railway worker has had to endure since his personal injury at work? I suppose tripping down the stairwell at a tube station seems like a rather minor injury indeed in comparison, doesn’t it?