Elevators are supposed to be safe, right?
by, Robert Box
If you are a passenger in an elevator; yes, they are safe. If you are involved in service or construction of elevators; yes, they are safe -or, at least they are supposed to be.
For elevator passengers, riding elevators is one of, if not the, safest mode of human transportation in a mechanical object. Only 1 in 12 million elevator rides result in some kind of problem, and that is usually a minor fault such as a car not aligning with a floor evenly, the doors not opening properly, and issues of the like.
Fatalities involving elevators usually total 20 to 30 per year, but those usually involve maintenance personnel or construction workers.
Maintenance and construction personnel working in or near elevator shafts are most often killed as a result of improper or inadequate fall protection. Roughly half of the maintenance and construction worker fatalities involving elevators are from falls down the elevator shaft.
A small percentage of workers, about 8%-10%, die from electrocution while working on elevators.
Roughly a third of all fatalities to elevator maintenance and construction workers involve being struck by an object or caught between objects -usually involving an elevator car and/or counterweights.
Man crushed by elevator in Waco, Texas (June 12, 2015)
A construction worker died just before noon at a new Baylor University Business School building construction site, when an elevator apparently fell on him, according to NY Daily News.
Police identified the man as Jeffrey Thaemert, 51, of Waco, who was an independent electrician working for Rosendin Electric of Dallas.
Rescue workers and police were dispatched to the Baylor campus at about 11:45 a.m. and determined the man to be dead upon arrival. No one else was reported to be injured in the incident.
“This is a terrible tragedy that touches every member of our community,” wrote Ken Starr, President and Chancellor of Baylor University, in an email sent to students, faculty and alumni. “Our thoughts and prayers go immediately to the family of Mr. Thaemert and his friends.”
There are no details from an ongoing investigation into the Waco fatality, but if we are to learn from previous crushed-by-elevator fatalities, failing to follow proper lockout/tagout procedures may be a contributing factor in the incident.
With death by electrocution involving elevators being relatively low, it would appear that maintenance and construction companies are at least aware of lockout/tagout programs related to elevators, so why aren’t lockout/tagout procedures being used properly to isolate stored potential energy (i.e., keeping elevator cars and counterweights from crushing workers)?
How can someone get crushed by an elevator?
Shortcuts. At this point, there are no details available for the elevator-related fatality at Baylor last week, but history tells us shortcutting safety procedures in some manner are at least partially, if not primarily or completely, to blame.
The Center for Construction Research and Training (CPWR) says employers who experience workers being crushed by elevators typically have one or more of the contributing factors:
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Lack of adequate safety training
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Lack of proper lockout/tagout program
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Lack of permit-required confined space program (pits at the base of elevator shafts are considered to be confined spaces)
Workers may be rewarded for completing maintenance or construction projects quickly, so employers may have an unwritten and unspoken incentive to bypassing safety protocol.
OSHA can make the case that employers influence workers to by-pass safety protocol to save time –even if there are no written documents or quotes from company officials to support such a case. OSHA is effective in obtaining information through employee interviews that can support such a narrative.
Two fatality incidents involving elevators crushing workers show typical examples of shortcutting (or bypassing entirely) proper lockout/tagout procedures.
Man crushed by elevator in Washington D.C. (1996)
An elevator car at a New Carrollton IRS center under construction fell onto two Fujitec America Inc. workers at the bottom of its shaft, killing one and injuring the other. The deceased was a 53-year-old male elevator construction foreman.
The accident occurred shortly after 3 p.m. while the two men were making adjustments in the pit under one car in a dual-shaft passenger elevator, fire officials said.
OSHA and NIOSH Investigators determined the technicians used two 10 foot, 4 in. by 4 in. wooden poles to brace the elevator car by leaning the poles against the elevator car rails. An acetylene torch was being used to cut supporting steel from the jack cylinder when the elevator car “unexpectedly collapsed,” according to an OSHA report, and wooden braces were not sufficient to restrain the falling elevator car.
When the elevator collapsed, the bottoms of the poles kicked out, rendering the poles useless. There was no indication in the investigation that tests were conducted on the wooden poles prior to their use as braces to assure they could be effectively used as sufficient supports for elevator cars.
Luckily for the surviving worker, the car did not fall evenly to the bottom of the pit, which permitted the rescue team to enter the pit and extract the survivor.
Man crushed by elevator in Tampa, FL (2013)
Mark Allen Johnson, 45, had been vacuuming oily water from the bottom of an elevator shaft at the TradeWinds Island Resort in Tampa, Florida. An elevator fell from the second floor, killing Mr. Johnson. The other worker was outside the shaft and not injured.
According to TampaBay.com, firefighters who arrived on the scene almost immediately noticed a missed safety step.
A hotel staffer had locked the elevator car on the upper floor before Johnson and a Progressive Environmental co-worker started cleaning the bottom of the shaft. However, main power to the elevator itself wasn’t completely turned off.
“According to our technical rescue team on scene, that elevator was not locked out,” said Lt. Joel Granata of St. Petersburg Fire and Rescue.
OSHA cited Progressive Environmental for five violations carrying proposed fines of $61,000, which were ultimately reduced to $30,000 during informal conference. Four of the five violations were related to lockout/tagout for:
- An employee’s failure to lock out the elevator;
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The lack of worker training on lockout/tagout procedures;
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Failure to coordinate lockout/tagout practices with the hotel staff; and
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Failure to develop lockout/tagout procedures for hydraulic elevators.
The hotel received lockout/tagout related citations as well.
Although details are not available from the two examples above, shortcuts seem apparent. Rather than propping wooden poles against elevator car rails to guard against the car accidentally falling on workers below, protections such as jacks, pipe stands, etc. should have been installed (not to mention a fully implemented lockout/tagout procedure) to prevent the hydraulic elevator from injuring workers in the pit.
It would seem from the examples above, and it may be shown to be a contributing cause in the fatality at Baylor, that formal lockout/tagout procedures were not followed. It also seems plausible that elevator-related crushing fatalities involve shortcutting or completely by-passing lockout/tagout procedures.
Safety First Consulting helps businesses identify OSHA compliance issues in their workplaces, manage their safety programs, and we become accountable for the results. In addition to offering custom written safety programs for companies, Safety First Consulting provides required safety training, industrial hygiene sampling, noise sampling, and workplace inspections.
