i live in London so travel very regularly on the tube with my three boys, the youngest is 2 (3 at the end of July). I don't use a pushchair for him as he started walking everywhere about 6 months ago. We are on the tube most days and I always hold his hand on the escalators and stand behind him in case he falls backwards (on the up ones) so I do consider that I supervise him to an adequate standard.
On Wednesday, midway up an escalator, he started screaming and twisted to face me and fell to a sitting position on the step. I looked down and could see a black line across his shoe. I picked him up and at the top of the escalator moved to some seats so I could sit him down and see what happened. He was very very distressed so wouldn't talk to me. I took off his shoe and sock and he had quite severe red marks across the knuckles of all his toes. He was crying so hard. I managed to get a few words out of him and it appeared he had put his foot in the brush that is at the side of the escalator. It obviously got stuck in a gap underneath and dragged.
I carried him up the next escalator to the barriers and told a member of staff what happened. he took us to a supervisor office and I told them and they logged my details. They offered to call an ambulance but at that point I just wanted to get him to my mother's place where we had been headed which was just outside the station. I carried him all the way there with him whimpering the whole way. I sat with him on my lap and he fell asleep within ten minutes. He does not sleep during the day. I think he was just so distressed that he needed to block it out. When he woke, he was still distressed and refused to put any weight on the foot. So I ended up taking him to A&E. They xrayed the foot and said it was not broken but he had a severe crush injury to the soft tissue and that he would limp for a while.
He has still not put his foot on the ground over 24 hours later. If you touch the foot underneath (which is very swollen) he gets very upset. If he tries to stand, he cries and buckles to the floor. I today finally examined his shoe that he was wearing at the time (it had sort of been chucked to the side and forgotten with one thing and another) and there is a deep gash that goes almost through the shoe. It is a croc shoe. So if he had been wearing sandals or less thick shoes, his toes would have been very badly cut.
My husband is furious about it all. He feels that if there is a gap that a child could get their foot stuck and crushed in, there is a design flaw in the escalators and they are not safe. He wants to contact a solicitor.
What would you do?