Being Thrown Or Falling In Front Of An Oncoming Subway Train — And Surviving!

After the luckiest man in New York escaped death by rolling into the subway track trough, the Times investigates all manners in which one can protect themselves in the path of an oncoming subway train:

Short of “stand away from the platform edge,” there are no hard-and-fast official guidelines to survive an oncoming New York City subway train. “There really is no one thing we can tell people that would work in every situation,” said Paul Fleuranges, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Depending on the station, one can seek refuge from an oncoming train in a few ways. None are foolproof.

A police detective with experience in the transit bureau recalled his training in last-ditch methods for surviving an oncoming train.

“They told us, ‘Get to the cutouts or be able to roll underneath the platform,'” he said, referring to niches cut into the subway tunnels and the space under some platforms themselves, where homeless people have been known to sleep.

A quick-thinking person may also find safety beneath the train, in the so-called trough between the tracks, which offers up to two feet of space below a train.

In 2003, a researcher for an Internet brokerage firm, Brandon Crismon, was pushed into the path of an oncoming No. 5 train at the Union Square station. He scrambled into the trough and lay flat, in what his half brother described as “kung-fu mode.”

The train stopped after two cars had passed over Mr. Crismon. He suffered a broken leg, cuts and bruises. He was lucky: The depths of troughs vary, Mr. Fleuranges said.

Finally, and no less a long shot, a person could try outrunning the train to the end of the platform, where it would presumably stop. In this and all situations, falling on to the electrified third rail could be fatal.

Meanwhile, researchers are collecting data about 12-9s, as they’re known in subway parlance*:

It is a fleeting fear surely shared by many a New Yorker who has leaned over a station platform searching for the dim headlights of an approaching subway car. One slip of the foot or one well-timed push is all it would take to land in front of a moving train.

Now, a group of doctors has examined the fate of those who ended up on the tracks and made it to the hospital.

The findings of the study, which looked at more than 200 injuries suffered by people brought to Bellevue Hospital Center during a 13-year period, are at times grisly and sometimes macabre, and often tragic, but undeniably fascinating for those who travel beneath the city.

The study, to be published in the March issue of The American Journal of Public Health, is hardly conclusive: According to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, there were 702 cases of people on the tracks between 1990 and 2003, the same period as the study. Roughly half of them resulted in death. But this is the first time a single hospital has tried to determine what can be gleaned from its cases.

Many of those taken to Bellevue were only slightly injured, with more than half of them leaving the hospital without requiring follow-up care. Only one of every 10 victims who made it to the hospital died, a credit to both the medical care they received and the response time of emergency workers.

*See here for “12-9” lingo.