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CHICAGO – It took nearly three hours to rescue six people stranded in an elevator at Chicago's fourth skyscraper, 875 North Michigan Avenue, formerly known as the John Hancock Center. CBS Chicago reported that a broken lift cable had caused a malfunction of the express elevator on Friday as guests who had just left the Signature Room on the 95th floor headed for the lobby.
The elevator and two others have since been closed to the public while repairs are being done and the investigators understand what has happened. What has prevented the elevator from collapsing to the bottom of the building? Several hoisting ropes support an elevator cabin. So, if one of them breaks down, the others are able to bear the weight.
While visiting Mexico, Jaime Montemayor did not expect his trip to Chicago to include being stuck in an elevator.
"At first I thought we were going to die," Montemayor said. "We were going down and I felt we were falling off, then I heard a clack of clack clac clac clac clac."
His wife, Mana Castillo, said that the elevator was moving quickly and that a dust-like material began to filter in the elevator. She learned that they had learned later that they had gone from the 95th to the 11th floor.
None of the people in the elevator were hospitalized.
Some elevator passengers stated that Hancock personnel security officers had not immediately called the fire department.
Someone who answered the phone at the Hancock Security Office on Friday declined to comment and hung up.
When rescuers rushed to find the elevator blocked early Friday morning, there was no opening between the floors due to the blind layout of the building.
The rescue team had to drill a concrete wall in the 11th floor garage. Today, cables hung near the cracked door, where people trapped in the elevator were put in safety.
"It was a precarious situation in which we had the broken cable above the elevator (and) we could not do the rescue from one elevator to another, we had to cross a wall", said Patrick Maloney, Fire Chief of the Chicago Battalion.
The city of Chicago requires annual inspections of all of its 22,000 elevators. The elevator down on Friday morning passed its most recent inspection in July this year.
City inspectors visited the Hancock in 2014 and 2017 for an elevator complaint inspection and a quote was issued for non-maintenance of the elevator equipment.
The archives show that these two problems have been solved.
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