By Jordyn Pair
mlive.com
ANN ARBOR, Mich. - A hospital employee was rescued from an elevator early Sunday morning after being trapped for nearly seven hours.
A man became trapped around 4:30 a.m., Sept. 28 after an elevator in C.S. Mott’s Children’s Hospital stopped roughly 30 feet below the eighth floor, the Ann Arbor Fire Department said on social media. The hospital is at 1540 E. Hospital Drive in Ann Arbor.
Typically, emergency responders will access a stuck elevator from the floor above or below, said Mike Kennedy, chief of the Ann Arbor Fire Department.
“Generally, these things are over within 15, 20 minutes,” said Kennedy. “Thirty at the tops.”
That wasn’t possible Sunday, though, because the children’s hospital has no elevator access between floors four and eight.
An elevator technician called to the scene also confirmed the emergency brake had locked, meaning moving it manually was also not an option. Although firefighters could have breached a hospital wall, they opted to rescue the man via rope since he was not injured or panicking, Kennedy said.
Using a harness and rope to rescue someone from an elevator is a career first for Kennedy, he said, and never the first option for removing someone from an elevator.
“It’s dangerous for us, dangerous for the person,” Kennedy said. “We never make that decision lightly.”
The man was raised from the elevator to the eighth floor around 11 a.m. No one was injured.
Elevator rescues have gone up in recent years, moving from 80 rescues each in 2021 and 2022 to 86 in 2023 and 85 in 2024, according to the department’s annual reports. Kennedy said he anticipates those numbers to continue to climb as the city’s buildings do.
Kennedy commended the man for remaining calm, something he said was vital to being able to rescue him without damaging the hospital or elevator.
Still, Kennedy quipped that being trapped in an elevator is “not how anyone wanted to spend a Sunday morning.”
The Ann Arbor Fire Department was assisted on scene by the University of Michigan Division of Public Safety and Security and other hospital employees.
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