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Elevator Problems in high-rise buildings

This story reminds me of a great article from the New Yorker last year about elevator accidents and also about the elevator's neglected role in our urban infrastructure.

elevators are extraordinarily safe—far safer than cars, to say nothing of other forms of vertical transport. Escalators are scary. Statistics are elusive (“Nobody collects them,” Edward Donoghue, the managing director of the trade organization National Elevator Industry, said), but the claim, routinely advanced by elevator professionals, that elevators are ten times as safe as escalators seems to arise from fifteen-year-old numbers showing that, while there are roughly twenty times as many elevators as escalators, there are only a third more elevator accidents. An average of twenty-six people die in (or on) elevators in the United States every year, but most of these are people being paid to work on them. That may still seem like a lot, until you consider that that many die in automobiles every five hours. In New York City, home to fifty-eight thousand elevators, there are eleven billion elevator trips a year—thirty million every day—and yet hardly more than two dozen passengers get banged up enough to seek medical attention.
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Still, elevator lore has its share of horrors: strandings, manglings, fires, drownings, decapitations. An estimated two hundred people were killed in elevators at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—some probably in free-fall plunges, but many by fire, smoke, or entrapment and subsequent structural collapse. The elevator industry likes to insist that, short of airplane rammings, most accidents are the result of human error, of passengers or workers doing things they should not. Trying to run in through closing doors is asking for trouble; so is climbing up into an elevator car, or down out of one, when it is stuck between floors, or letting a piece of equipment get lodged in the brake, as happened to a service elevator at 5 Times Square, in Manhattan, four years ago, causing the counterweight to plummet (the counterweight, which aids an elevator’s rise and slows its descent, is typically forty per cent heavier than an empty car) and the elevator to shoot up, at sixty miles an hour, into the beams at the top of the shaft, killing the attendant inside. Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable.
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When I walked through the TD Centre this morning, part of the concourse was still screened off behind black curtains, with two security guys standing there.
 
While it may be safer than traveling by car and less dangerous, It defiantly is a convenience that most people would not want to live without. Elevators save the legs a lot of walking, Specially when you are caring a bunch of Timmie's to the people you are working with. So I'll take the risk. :)
 
I got trapped in one in St. Jamestown for 20 minutes before we managed to open the outside doors of the car (the inside one kept opening and closing on it's own :S)

So. Scared.

I'd read that NYT article (about the guy being trapped for a thousand hours at floor 13 of all places) and could only think about the part where people are safest inside the cars and that they only really die or get hurt when they try to leave it :S
 
The building where I work here in Windsor Ont. is forever breaking down. I've been stuck in it multiple times. It likes to skip floors, go up to the top floor where I'm supposed to be getting off, then go right back down to the first floor. Sometimes a few times before it will open. Then Just to spite you, it will go up to the top floor, only to get half way between 9 and 10, and then the doors open, so you have to go back down, and try again, does the same thing when you try to get off at 5, one of the other offices I work in. Except you end up halfway passing 5 and the doors open. You never know for sure what it's going to do from day to day. Still, better then 10 flights of stairs 3-5 times a day. :p
 
Mr.Colley said:
The building where I work here in Windsor Ont. is forever breaking down. I've been stuck in it multiple times. It likes to skip floors, go up to the top floor where I'm supposed to be getting off, then go right back down to the first floor. Sometimes a few times before it will open. Then Just to spite you, it will go up to the top floor, only to get half way between 9 and 10, and then the doors open, so you have to go back down, and try again, does the same thing when you try to get off at 5, one of the other offices I work in. Except you end up halfway passing 5 and the doors open. You never know for sure what it's going to do from day to day. Still, better then 10 flights of stairs 3-5 times a day. :p
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Why would you put up with that? You need to call the TSSA, report all relevant details and request an inspection.
 
I'm not sure what the TSSA is. Though I am not in Toronto, so that may make a difference. We have people coming in all the time to fix it. About 3 times a week. They need to be completely replaced, but the owner of the building is to cheap to do so.
 
Sorry about the multiple post's there DT, server at work was going nuts.
And thanks you, very much for the link. I will defiantly be taking a look at this and forwarding it off to others that i work with. Your feedback is much appreciated. :)
 
The lifts in these buildings are surprisingly crap. I don't know about the other onrd in the complex. But the ones that go all the way up to the 54 floor have very bumpy rides.

First time up those elevators seriously did make me a little bit of nervous. But at least they move very fast.
 
are they bumpy the entire way? or just on starts and stops? because that could indicate a huge problem if its the entire way though...
 
Mr.Colley said:
are they bumpy the entire way? or just on starts and stops? because that could indicate a huge problem if its the entire way though...
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the entire way. Start and stop on the otherhand were surprisingly smooth in comparasion.

I'm not an elevator expert. But it feels like rails (or whatever the stuff which holds the cars in line are called) have bumps in them.

I haven't been on one for over two years now. Maybe it's different these days.
 
I work in a brand new building downtown (about 4 years old) where one of the elevators is out of order 50% of the time or more.

And I thought that elevators were one of those technologies that they had figured out by now.
 
Why would the escape hatch be locked?

Men trapped in flooded elevator punched through ceiling to make lifesaving 911 call
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-elevator-rescue-1.4777629

In NYC elevators are required to have functioning escape hatches
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dob/downloads/bldgs_code/bcrs18.pdf

REFERENCE STANDARD RS-18
ELEVATORS AND CONVEYORS

(14) Top Emergency Exit. Elevators shall be equipped with a car enclosure, which shall have a top emergency exit conforming to the requirements of Rule 204.1e.
 
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