We have these old rickety elevators in our building at work. One of them frequently gets stuck between floors with somebody in the car. The hapless victim leans on the alarm bell, eventually somebody hears it and rounds up two or three strong men to pry the door open. Then the rider has to either climb up or down a half a floor to get out.
Then the building mechanic comes to inspect the elevator, and takes it out of service for a week or more. Later that month, we notice that car is operating again so we all assume it must have been fixed. Of course you have already figured out what happens next. It swallows up another innocent passenger like some evil mechanized Venus Elevator Trap.
But getting back to the question: These cars are just old. They take off with a lurch, and sometimes sound like they’re scraping the sides of the shaft as they move. The lights are dim, and sometimes flicker in sync with the jerky motion. The only thing that’s missing is Vincent Price as the operator.
I’m just waiting for the day when the car drops like a safe from my floor (the top floor of course). It’s only seven stories, but would I survive? I think I probably would, maybe with a broken leg or two. Let’s also assume (safely, I think) that the safety mechanisms & speed governors are faulty, and that even the automatic brakes fail to engage. And what if it were ten floors, or 25? what’s the best thing to do?
Looking at the human body as a bag of liquid, it seems to me that lying flat (with your hands clasped under the back of your head for a cushion) would be the best thing, so as to spread the impact force out equally over your entire body. You’d end up with more bruises & maybe a hematoma or two, but fewer broken bones. Standing up straight would result in most of the impact being absorbed by your bones, especially the backbone. Lying down flat would damage more of the soft tissues. Which is better?
I think parachutists are taught to try to land foot first at an angle if both chutes fail, the idea being that their legs will absorb the initial shock of landing, their internal organs will be spared the damage that might happen if their hips were in line with the rest of their body and their head will probably hit last and have less momentum for doing so.
From a report about an elevator fall after a bomber hit the Empire State Building. The linked story reports that Ms. Oliver was injured before she entered the elevator. A seven story fall should be less harmful.
…And to add another link, on their Myths and Fears page, the Elevator Escalator Safety Foundation claims that this was “the only elevator fall due to a complete cable system failure.”
Funny, I thought that elevators had brakes that activated whenever a cable broke, but I couldn’t find a mention anywhere.
400 years ago, Galileo showed that all objects (…for all intents and purposes. Let’s not revive that thread.) fall at the same rate. The only reason you would float to the ceiling is if you pushed off the floor during the fall.
Whoopee! I get to use my knowledge from ten years in the elevator biz!
They do, so it’s mostly an irrational fear. The exceptions are hydraulic elevators (generally, anything less than five stops).
Me: I would think that a leak would cause the car to drop slowly. My two years in the hydraulics biz showed how slowly hydraulic fluid flows.
Safety Dude: Not if the entire endcap blows out. Then the car drops like a rock.
Me: Pshaw! That could never happen!
Dude: The endcaps are usually made of a dissimilar metal. They are welded on, not bolted. The cylinder is buried in a hole as deep as the building is tall. The hole can leak, letting water in. In the moist environment the dissimilar metals react electrolytically. Maybe there’s a little leak, or maybe the endcap just blows out and people get hurt.
Safety Dude helped develop a safety brake for hydraulics and the last I heard they were putting them on every elevator in every Sears store.
HOWEVER, the best way to die in an elevator is to panic when the car stops between floors, climb out the top, and slip and fall (greasy environment) or get trapped after prying the doors open and the car starts up again. I’ve seen the photos; Safety Dude was on the ANSI safety committee and often testified, so working with him was like a visit to rotten.com sometimes.
Similar to what dropzone posted, I’ve been told that one should never, never try to climb out of an elevator that’s stuck between floors. (I was told this while I was actually stuck in an elevator.) While I was in Asia, I did hear one or two news stories on how somebody had been cut in half or decapitated while trying to do this.
I worked in a factory years ago as summer help in a Switch Company.
My Job?
I made circut boards that were for elevator brakes:)
All the rest of the summer help worked in the shipping dept. Of course I was only 18 at the time, and within 2 weeks of my 8 week stint I went from making small board with 3 components to making the largest boards with several hundred wires.
So you should feel safe. Everyone knows that you know everything and you are could never possibly be wrong when you are 18.
FTR…
I have no idea how any of it works IRL, I never saw the whole product or left the factory to see anything get installed.
You would not be weightless during your fall since the elevator will have to move the air out of the way as it falls. I also assume their is also some friction from the elevator to the shaft. That said you would ‘weight’ a lot less due to the floor accelerating away from you. This would make it difficult to reposition yourself for impact.
Vis-a-vis weightlessness, you certainly would be “weightless” during the early portion of the trip, seeing as you and the car are being accelerated downward at the same rate. However, once the car started to approach its terminal velocity, (which would - my WAG - be substantially less than a standard freefall due to friction against the guide rails, minimal space for air to slip past up the shaft, etc.) you would drift back towards the floor and regain all your “weight,” since there would be no such extra variables in the system of your-body-to-car’s-interior.
This, of course, would be dependent on the fall being far enough to reach that point. Anything less than ten floors or so (another WAG), you might not get your footing back.
This is slightly off-topic, but I’ve heard that in some of the deepest coal mines, they allow the industrial elevators to free fall for part of their descent simply to reduce the transit time for miners starting work. I’d kinda like to try that.
I remember from my forklift training that the hydraulic system which raises the forks has a safety feature called a “restricting orifice” (kinda what I think of some people I know ). This means that if I raise a heavy load on the forks, even to their highest extent, if the hydraulic lines were to suffer a complete and sudden failure (ie. burst or be severed), the restricting orifice would only allow the hydraulic fluid to escape gradually, and the forks would descend relatively slowly. Maybe elevators have something similar?
Wouldn’t help if there were catastrophic failure of the cylinder’s endcap. Then the “restricting orifice” is the same diameter as the cylinder, ie: no restriction at all.
During the bad old days of the Cold War there was a poster going around giving instructions on what to do in case of a nuclear attack. Generally the instructions were to bend over, clasp hands behind knees, pull hard, kiss your butt goodby. The same rules apply in a free falling elevator, if you have time.
I’ve thought about this often. I look at the ceiling of every elevator I enter, and often there’s something up there to grab on to. Either a light fixture, or ornate grillework, or sometimes the escape hatch is missing its panel, so you could grab the edge (but not climb out, of course).
How about this: you grab something at the top of the elevator with your arms and hold on really tight. So when the elevator hits bottom, all the energy focuses on your arms. You’re ripped off the ceiling…maybe your arms break, maybe they’re even ripped off, but still that transaction uses up most of the energy of the crash.
Then you hit the floor of the elevator and get another nasty crash. But it’s much less than it would have been, so you’re maimed, but alive.
Would that work for any/most heights? Has it ever been tested?
I think the boss will have to get stuck in one of them before anything gets done, and even then the building engineer would prolly just do the same thing (rope it off for a week or two and then open it back up for the next victim).
Stairs are an option, and I usually do use them to go to the adjacent floors, but when I get to work in the morning after a walk in 90° heat with 90% humidity, walking up seven flights of stairs is a real turn off.
). This means that if I raise a heavy load on the forks, even to their highest extent, if the hydraulic lines were to suffer a complete and sudden failure (ie. burst or be severed), the restricting orifice would only allow the hydraulic fluid to escape gradually, and the forks would descend relatively slowly. Maybe elevators have something similar?