SINGAPORE — A regular morning commute last Wednesday (Oct 25) left a 25-year-old finance professional badly bruised, after her leg was wedged in the gap between the train and the station platform at City Hall MRT Station.

Ms Koh, who declined to be identified by her full name, told TODAY she was taking the East-West Line to Raffles Place, where her office is located, when the incident took place just before 9am.

While City Hall was not her stop, passengers were rushing off from the train and a nudge from the crowd made her lose her balance and her left leg went through the gap.

Only one person stopped to help by holding the train door, Ms Koh said, adding that no one hit the emergency communication button in the train or tried to lift her.

To add to the panic, there was an announcement in the train that the doors were closing, Ms Koh said. With some effort, she was able to pull her leg out of the gap in “a minute or less”, and stood up on her own.

She continued her journey in the train and realised the extent of her injury only as she was arriving at Raffles Place. A big bruise had formed on her left thigh, which had become “very swollen” and painful to the touch.

After being helped to the station’s resting room, SMRT employees phoned for an ambulance. Ms Koh was taken to the Singapore General Hospital, where she received outpatient treatment.

More than a week after the incident, Ms Koh said that she was still limping, although she has stopped taking the painkillers prescribed.

Noting that the platform gaps on the newer Downtown Line were considerably smaller than those in the underground stations on the East-West Line, she said: “I’m an average-sized person; if my leg can go in all the way up to my thigh, what about small children or elders?”

She added: “If it’s a child who’s much smaller than me, and both legs go in, I’ve no idea what will happen to them. It’s really quite dangerous.”

A member of SMRT’s customer service team has been in touch with Ms Koh since the incident. The operator also sent a fruit basket to her home a day after the incident, she said.

Ms Koh’s fees from the hospital’s accident and emergency department are covered by her company’s group medical insurance plan, but she has not received the bill for the ambulance, which is “not claimable”.

This is not the first time commuters have had their legs stuck in the gaps between the train and platform.

In May 2015, a woman lost her balance after she was pushed while standing near the door of a train at Boon Keng MRT Station — which is along the North-East Line — and her right leg slipped into the 10cm gap. The incident delayed services by about 40 minutes, as the commuter could not get her leg out and had to be freed by rescuers from the Singapore Civil Defence Force.

The Land Transport Authority (LTA) said then that new trains on the North-East Line and Circle Line would be fitted with “gap fillers”, which reduce the space between trains and platforms. It also said that platform gaps vary across different rail lines. For the North-South and East-West Lines, only the above-ground stations have gap fillers that have been installed along the platform edges since 1997, narrowing the gaps from 11cm to 7.5cm.

However, the design of the platform screen doors in the underground stations on the two oldest lines — including City Hall, where the latest incident happened — ruled out the installation of such fillers.