A Dupont Circle escalator is now even more expensive than Metro’s already pricey equipment: A ring worth an estimated $12,000 is apparently stuck inside. Alaina Van Horn lost a family heirloom Saturday afternoon while riding the escalator down into the station from the north entrance, as first reported by NBC Washington. She was pulling off a glove when the ring fell off.
“That’s the last anyone saw it,” Metro spokesman Dan Stessel told The Washington Examiner.
| Riders add to escalator woes |
| Metro has its escalator problems, and then it has its riders. |
| Sometimes the riders make the escalator problems worse, the agency has said. |
| General Manager Richard Sarles has said that some riders push the emergency stop buttons, putting the moving staircases out of service until a worker can check on the unit and start it back up. |
| Riders’ trash and even their flip-flops get sucked into the steps, clogging the moving parts. In February, the stairs of a Foggy Bottom escalator collapsed underneath riders after a piece of cloth got caught inside the machinery. |
| There have not been any reports yet of pricey jewels causing any shutdowns, though. |
Riders lose all kinds of things in the transit system, with the agency’s Lost and Found office typically logging in more than 3,000 items a month. But usually the belongings are glasses, cell phones or keys left on trains, not pricey gems stuck in escalators.
And this time, Metro workers are doing more than usual to find the ring, opening up the 188-foot-long escalator twice so far.
Immediately after Van Horn told Metro officials it was lost, Stessel said, workers pulled up several comb plates to look inside. But after a few minutes, they stopped because they didn’t want to disable the escalator at the system’s fifth-busiest station. Only one other escalator was working at that entrance because the third is being rehabilitated. Shutting down the escalator with the lost ring meant the agency had to shut down the only other working escalator, too, so riders could walk up or down.
On Tuesday night, about a half-dozen escalator technicians and Metro’s chief spokesman returned to do a more thorough search. The agency shut down the escalators at the entrance at 10:15 p.m. “The customer impact was minimal,” Stessel said. “We waited until after the Caps fans thinned out.”
The crew pulled up several steps, pumped out standing water, then searched through the muck. All told, the crew spent about 90 minutes looking for the ring.
“We went through with sifters like we were searching for gold in the 1840s — to no avail,” Stessel said.
But the search hasn’t been called off. In January, Metro plans to take apart the escalator where the ring fell for an annual inspection.
“It’s such a big unit and has so many places for it to go,” Stessel said. “It could be riding on the back side of a step.”
Metro has no estimates of how much staff time and agency resources have been spent to find the ring. “Certainly in the name of customer service, it’s worth it,” Stessel said.
