The subway tracks are a big source of fear for many New Yorkers. What happens if you fall on to the tracks? Or if you see someone else fall? What would you do?
While many of us have likely made an escape plan in our heads, at least one New Yorker now knows exactly what to do when someone falls onto the tracks.
When Gray Davis, a 31-year-old ballet dancer, saw a homeless man fall onto the subway tracks on Saturday, he jumped down there with him to pull him out.
"People were screaming to get help," Davis told The New York Times. "But nobody jumped down. So I jumped down."
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It wasn't until he was already down there that he realized how dangerous it was.
“I don’t know if I had time to process it until I saw my wife coming down crying — then I realized it was scary," Davis told The New York Times.
He lifted the unconscious man onto the platform and then needed to figure out how he would get himself back up — all while he could hear a train in the distance. That's when his ballet training came in handy. Davis simply swung his leg up to climb back onto the platform.
Unfortunately, we're not all ballet dancers and a save like this pretty much requires the strength of someone trained in lifting people and jumping really high.
In an interview with the Metropolitan Transit Authority's customer safety podcast, Jim Wineck, director of Hazard Assessment, said that it's highly unlikely that most people would be able to do what Davis did.
"People don’t realize how high it is from the track bed to the platform edge," he said. "And people, if you jump down there, people think they can jump right up and they can’t. They don’t make it."
If something, or someone, falls onto the tracks, Wineck said the best thing to do is to notify a MTA worker who can get the word out to stop any oncoming trains.
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