A man got his foot stuck in the shutter of Merode metro station in Etterbeek early on Tuesday morning, the Brussels fire brigade reported. It isn't the first time a person has become trapped in this way, with the emergency services previously having to intervene in similar cases.
Local police in the Montgomery area (Etterbeek/Woluwe-Saint-Lambert/Woluwe-Saint-Pierre) discovered the man at around 04:45 on Tuesday morning on the Yser side of the metro station.
"Luckily for him, the police in the area had noticed and were already helping him before calling the fire brigade and 112 medical services," the fire brigade's spokesperson Walter Derieuw said.
"The injured man, who was very drunk, was released from his unfortunate position and taken to hospital." The circumstances of the incident have yet to be determined, according to the fire brigade.
A problem with the shutters?
The series of people becoming trapped in metro station shutters started in March last year. A man was taken to hospital after becoming trapped in the shutters of one of the entrances to the Porte de Namur Metro station in Brussels. Authorities were puzzled as to how the situation came about.
Following the incident, emergency services stated that they were very surprised by the incident. But two months later, a heavily inebriated man was left hanging from the metro station at Parvis de Saint-Gilles. Just over a week later, the same thing happened at Porte de Hal metro station.
What initially seemed a droll circumstance turned dire when a man who became trapped in a shutter at Rogier metro station died. "These are people trying to get into the station. The reason they do so just before the shutters open is unclear to us," a STIB spokesperson commented. Speculations have questioned whether the victims were homeless people trying to enter the metro to sleep at night. But often those involved were intoxicated.
In response to these incidents, Brussels Mobility launched a plan to replace the shutters of several stations with ones that cannot be forced open at the end of June.
