Found all over China’s streets are white round-topped fences. They serve as deterrent to jaywalking. They also prevent drivers from driving on the wrong lanes.
Instead of doing any of these things however, it had managed to kill a pregnant lady in a freak accident that sparked debate about the safety and the design of these fences: this is the third incident in six years that a person has died because of these fences.
According to reports from CCTV, “she seemed to feel dizzy, and intended to lean against the railing to take a rest, but then fainted and her head slipped into the rails.”
People came to her rescue, attempting to pull the fence apart to release her head, but they failed.
READ: Baby survives after pregnant mother is slaughtered in a car crash
Videos of the incident are making their rounds online.
They show the 30-year-old woman with her head squeezed between a chest-high fence on a street in Yulin, a city in northern China’s Shaanxi province. Her right knee was also squeezed into the fence.
“Officials said they couldn’t yet decide why the woman fainted suddenly, which led to her getting stuck and suffocating, but she could have suffered from a heatstroke or hypertension,” CCTV reported.
Despite efforts to revive her, the pregnant woman died at Mizhi County Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, said Beijing News.
Meanwhile, local newspaper Huashang News said the woman had just dropped off her 11-year-old daughter at school.
Opinions about the safety of these fences were voiced on popular Chinese social media website Sina Weibo.
READ: Father Dies Trying to Drive Pregnant Wife to the Hospital
“Heartbreaking!” one user said. “The design of the fences should be reevaluated. The gap between the fences should either be broadened or removed. This case is not the only one in China in recent years!”
A similar case happened in not three years ago.
“In October 2013, a 26-year-old woman began to faint while walking on a Beijing street, lurched towards the fence, and fell so that her neck lodged between its rails. The police arrived 20 minutes later and found her foaming at the mouth. She later died in the hospital,” said an LA Times report.
Then in 2010 in the city of Nantong in southeastern China’s Jiangsu province, an elderly woman was found stuck in a fence near a supermarket and had died before the ambulance came.
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