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http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/lo...tor_fatal_090624/20090624/?hub=TorontoNewHome
From ctv news. This doesn't happen that much.
From ctv news. This doesn't happen that much.
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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.
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.
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.
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...