A problem with a towering escalator at a Manhattan theater sent a pack of moviegoing schoolkids toppling like dominos yesterday morning, leaving 24 of them hurt, authorities said.
The group of Brooklyn Catholic-school children – ranging from kindergarten to eighth grade – were set to see the 11 a.m. IMAX screening of “The Polar Express” at the Loews Lincoln Center Theater on 68th Street and Broadway when disaster struck. About 79 kids were heading on the escalator up to the third-floor IMAX theater, said an FDNY spokesman, when a massive pileup wreaked havoc on the schoolkids.
It’s unclear what caused the collision – a witness gives a different account than the theater officials – but it created a chain reaction, with falling kids piling on top of each other like dominos.
Of the 24 injured people, 14 were taken to New York Hospital.
A spokesman for the Brooklyn Diocese said five of those hospitalized were students at St. Jerome’s Catholic School and one other person was a teacher at the Flatbush school.
He did not know if the others were students.
The most seriously injured of the Flatbush students complained of neck, back and spine pain, the spokesman said.
Jack Edme, a chaperone and a father of three kids from St. Jerome’s, had already ridden the escalator to the third floor and didn’t see what started the problem. But he heard shouts and saw panicked kids tumbling over each other like human dominos as the escalator kept going.
“I heard screaming and yelling, I turned around and saw all these frightened faces,” Edme said.
“There was like 50 bodies on the escalator. I started just pulling people out, tossing them to the side. Legs were intertwined, arms intertwined. People were just panicking.”
They were kicking and screaming to try to get off the escalator, he said.
“The last time I was this traumatized was Sept. 11, that’s how awful it felt,” Edme said. “People were literally punching and kicking and jumping to get off the escalator,” he said. “It was a stampede.”
In a statement, Loews said the accident apparently was caused by someone pressing the emergency stop button, bringing the moving staircase to a sudden halt.
“This morning, one of our escalators came to a stop, causing some children to lose their balance and fall,” the statement said. “We have our escalators routinely serviced and maintenanced.”