Technical Safety BC released a report on an incident where three paramedics and a critically ill patient were trapped for about 25 minutes after a door derailed from a worn track. The report points to three contributing factors: worn components not flagged during inspections, the building's second elevator being out of service for nearly two years which concentrated wear, and the elevator running in automatic mode rather than independent service mode. Any one of those alone might not have caused the incident. Together they did. For inspectors and maintenance contractors here: when a building runs one elevator into the ground because the other is offline long-term, whose job is it to flag the increased risk? And how often do you find elevators that should be in independent service mode but are not?
