An ordinary training session in the gym turned into a tragedy in a matter of seconds: a girl was running on the Tapis Roulant and tripped, falling from the window that was too close to the machine and dying shortly after in hospital.
It happened last June 18 in Indonesia, in a gym in the city of Pontianak, in the western part of the country.
A 22-year-old girl went to train on the third floor of the facility, the K-Gym, and began running on the treadmill for 30 minutes, before slowing down and then switching from running to walking.
“Then she suddenly fell backwards until she fell out of the window,” he said Antonius Trias Kuncurojati, police commissioner of Pontianak, as reported by Kompas.com. The girl fell to the ground and was urgently transported to the hospital with a series of bruises all over her body; She was shortly afterwards pronounced dead due to a haemorrhage in the head.
Following the accident, the gym remained closed for three days and the authorities immediately started investigations by listening to witnesses and people with a role in the management of the gym, to understand how to distribute responsibility for the tragedy, taking into consideration a first essential factor, that of the window from which the girl fell.
The position of the window
When examining the area on the third floor of the gym, the police immediately looked at the window, which was open at the time of the girl’s fall, when it should have remained closed. Stickers had been applied to the windows by the management, inviting customers not to open the windows, but as the commissioner himself saw with his own eyes, those stickers were ruined and the warning had been rewritten with a marker.
Furthermore, at the time of the fall, the personal trainer was on break, and among his tasks there was also that of ensuring that the windows of the structure were closed. While we try to establish who could have opened the window, there is another fundamental element that led to the tragedy and which is being investigated.
The treadmill faced the inside of the room, so those who used it were forced to have their backs to the window, which was positioned 60 centimeters from the machine; furthermore, the height of the wall that separated the window from the floor was only 30 centimetres.
A combination of factors which was lethal for the young woman but which could have put anyone in danger: “The management should provide safety structures”, added the commissioner, who made it known that the investigations are continuing.
