Hancock Elevator Dropped From 95th To 11th Floor, Passenger Says
CHICAGO (CBS)—It took nearly three hours to rescue six people stuck in an elevator in Chicago's fourth-tallest building early Friday.
A broken hoist rope caused the express elevator to malfunction while guests who had just left the Signature Room on the 95th floor rode down toward the lobby. The elevator and two others have since been closed to the public while repairs are made and investigators figure out what happened.
What kept the elevator from tumbling down to the bottom of the building? Several hoist ropes hold up an elevator car, so if one fails, the others are able to carry the weight.
Visiting from Mexico, Jaime Montemayor didn't expect his trip to Chicago to include getting stuck in an elevator.
"At the beginning I believed we were going to die," Montemayor said. "We were going down and then I felt that we were falling down and then I heard a noise--clack clack clack clack clack clack."
His wife, Mana Castillo, said the elevator was moving fast and suddenly a material that looked like dust started filtrating into the elevator.
She said they found out later that they had careened from the 95th floor down to the 11th floor.
None of the people in the elevator were hospitalized.
Some of the elevator passengers said security officers staffed at the Hancock didn't immediately call firefighters.
Someone who answered the phone at the Hancock security office Friday declined to comment and hung up the phone.
When rescuers scrambled to find the stuck elevator early Friday morning, there were no openings between floors because of the building's blind-shaft style layout.
The rescue crew had to hammer out a concrete wall in the garage area of the 11th floor. Today, cables were dangling next to the cracked door where the people trapped in the elevator were pulled to safety.
"It was a precarious situation where we had the cable break on top of the elevator (and) we couldn't do an elevator-to-elevator rescue we had to breach a wall," said Chicago Battalion Fire Chief Patrick Maloney.
Hancock visitors on Friday were using freight elevators to travel to the top of the building. People were shuttled and transferred to various service elevators throughout the day, with building staff assigned to operate the lifts.
Unaware of the Hancock's elevator problem, tourists Rob Lily and Andrew Winter, visiting Chicago from New Zealand, were enjoying the picturesque city views from the top of the building Friday.
Lily and Winter agreed they probably wouldn't have journeyed to the top if they had known.
The City of Chicago requires annual inspections of all of its 22,000 elevators. The elevator that failed Friday morning passed its most recent inspection in July of this year.
City inspectors visited the Hancock in 2014 and 2017 for an elevator complaint inspection and a citation was issued for failure to maintain electric elevator equipment.
Both of those issues were resolved, records show.
