Metro workers examining the escalator in Chinatown yesterday morning. (TBD Staff)

This item has been updated to reflect a new witness account and comments from Metro, including the announcement that it will be doing a fresh inspection of all 588 of its escalators. It was originally posted at 12:10 a.m. on Thursday.

On Wednesday night D.C. resident Stephen Davis, 32, went to the Capitals-Maple Leafs game at Verizon Center with his wife, Rachel. After the Caps won 5-4 in overtime, Davis says they headed to the Chinatown Metro station entrance at 7th and H streets NW, about to make their way back to Mount Pleasant on the Green Line.

Their ride on the first escalator went smoothly. But their ride on the second, shorter escalator -- the one that heads toward the kiosk and faregates -- ended in shouts, panic, and a near-pileup.

Davis, a communications coordinator for D.C.-based Transportation for America, says the escalator was jam-packed with Caps fans, to the point where riders on the left no longer tried to walk down the steps. He wasn’t halfway down the escalator when “it felt like something let go,” he says. “You could still hear the motor going but it felt like it wasn’t hooked up to the conveyor belt.”

The escalator, he says, started moving at at least twice its normal speed. People started to murmur, then to shout. Once people reached the bottom they scrambled to get out of the way of the riders behind them. People were yelling, “Get out of the way! Get out of the way!” When Davis hit the ground he jumped to the side.

“Everybody was freaking out at the bottom and running and trying to get away,” he says. “It was just dumping people at the bottom at a rate that was unsustainable.”

Chris Klein, 41, an information technology auditor who lives in Alexandria, says he was on the same escalator after the game when it started running out of control. He imagines he was a few steps ahead of Davis.

"Halfway down, it was like a gear slipped," Klein says. "It had a jerk and then it completely accelerated.... We just started sliding down."

It was still moving fast when Klein reached the bottom. He looked for an emergency stop switch and didn't see one. People were jumping out of the way of the riders coming up behind them.

It all lasted a matter of maybe ten seconds, Davis and Klein say. The escalator eventually slowed. Everyone who’d been on the escalator headed toward the trains.

They both say no one seemed to be seriously hurt. Klein says that's probably because the scrum was made up of mostly young adults, the type of crowd that sticks around to the end of a double-overtime game on a Wednesday night.

According to Metro spokesperson Reggie Woodruff, no one reported any incident on Wednesday night, but Metro inspected the escalators at Chinatown yesterday based on this report. One was found to be in need of a new part. It is now out of service and expected to be repaired by Nov. 9. Metro has since announced it will inspect all of its 588 escalators in the wake of the incidents.

As described by Davis and Klein, the incident is similar to witness accounts of the runaway escalator at L'Enfant Plaza during the Rally to Restore Sanity on Saturday. In that breakdown, heavy crowds led to a brake failure, causing the escalator to accelerate. A pileup at the bottom injured 16 people, including four who had to be treated, one for internal injuries.

If you were a witness to the Chinatown incident, drop me a line at djamieson@tbd.com