Firefighters found a dead woman entangled in machinery Thursday in a non-public baggage-processing area at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago.
Larry Langford, a spokesperson for the Chicago Fire Department, said firefighters were called to the airport around 7:45 a.m. for a report of a person pinned in machinery used to move baggage. He said they discovered the woman entangled in a conveyer belt system in a baggage room.
Police said she was 57 years old but have not released her name.
The baggage room wasn’t publicly accessible, Langford said, and it’s not clear how she found her way into it. Scott Allen, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Labor, said an official with the Occupational Health and Safety Administration visited the scene and learned the woman was not an airport employee.
Looks like at some of their claims have the “door” for the bags that is plenty big enough for a person to crawl through. If that’s what happened, I honestly don’t know how you make a system that physically protects against it while still being flexible enough to handle any piece of luggage that will fit.
Sensors that stop the line when they detect something that isn’t baggage or a parcel?
“Sensors” sounds like a magical solution that hasn’t been thought through, but the marketing guys already sold it and won’t listen to the engineers explaining how difficult it is to actually build such a thing.
Companies use them in conveyor systems quite extensively. They can be used to detect anomalies, differentiate between different types of product, etc. the technology already exists, it would just need to be adapted and programmed to this specific use. Airports already use similar technology for baggage routing, although they’re scanning tags instead of image processing.
