If you are a prepper or preparedness minded individual, a common refrain you will hear from ‘normal’ people, about various EDC (Every Day Carry) items you have, is “Why do you have THAT?” and it is usually in reference to something fairly useful like knives or flashlights. Even more ironic is that they only usually know you have it because something has occurred that has given you cause to pull it out and use it, which should answer their question.

While having EDC items usually turn minor inconveniences into non-issues, they can also make the difference in life or death situations. Consider this incident in Quebec a few days ago¹:

The Quebec coroner’s office is conducting an autopsy on Naima Rharouity, a 47-year-old mother of two who was killed after a piece of clothing she was wearing became caught in an escalator at a Montreal train station.

 Rharouity was at Fabre metro Thursday morning when the accident happened. It appears that she was traveling down an escalator when she fell. An item of clothing became stuck in the mechanism and tightened around her neck, strangling her.

Witnesses told police they saw the unnamed victim struggling to free her scarf after it got lodged in the teeth of an escalator on her way down to the subway platform.

‘While she was trying to pull up her scarf from the escalator, her hair got caught too and from there, everything got tied up at the end of the escalators,’ said Constable Jean-Pierre Brabant, of the Montreal police.

Commuter Bassam Joubarani told CBC.ca he saw two Good Samaritans rushing to the aid of the 48-year-old woman, who was lying unconscious on her back at the bottom of the moving stairs.

Joubarani recalled seeing the trapped victim still breathing, with half of her body resting on the escalator.