Chicago Elevator Drops 84 Floors With Tourists Inside

I know this phrase is a tad overused but I think ‘absolute nightmare fuel’ applies here.

From CBS News:

It took nearly three hours to rescue six people stuck in an elevator in Chicago’s fourth-tallest skyscraper — the 875 North Michigan Avenue building, formerly called the John Hancock Center. CBS Chicago reported that a broken hoist rope caused the express elevator to malfunction Friday while guests who had just left the Signature Room on the 95th floor rode down toward the lobby.

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.”

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.

Holy Hell. Each story of a building is approximately 10 feet so these people careened down about 840 feet fearing the worst the whole way down.

If I were on this elevator I’d be riding the Brown Line immediately so to anyone who made it through this with clean underwear – you possess a level of coolness & toughness that warrants automatic Navy SEAL status in my book. (Now all you have to do is write a book about it.)

The silver lining here is that miraculously no one was injured or needed to go to the hospital. Since that’s the case I think I can say one of my favorite parts has been footage of a newscaster for CBS local chatting up tourists the following day.

Apparently the building just had everyone using the freight elevators without mentioning the incident, and the guy kept bursting their bubbles by asking if they’d heard the news only after they came back down from the top.

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.

Not sure what this says about me but I think I’d get a weird satisfaction of being the one to tell them that news & get the reactions.

In closing, according to CBS ‘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.’

So to all the city dwellers, happy travels back down to street level as this workday comes to a close!