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Catching Elevators

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Blood streamed down the outside of the elevator doors in the lobby. The building nurse fell backward when he saw Gomez. A surgeon arrived at the scene to amputate the leg. Instead, Gomez was lifted out of the elevator with flotation devices, the way sunken submarines are raised.

Gomez was hospitalized for a month and had eight surgeries to save his leg, which is held together with rods and screws. He lost half the muscle in his leg and can't feel anything from his knee to his groin.

After his accident, the Boston Globe reported that despite existing state laws, only half the elevators in Massachusetts were inspected. Because Gomez was a public official, his story was used to illustrate the need for elevator safety laws to be strengthened and enforced. They were.

Gomez was unable to work for a year and a half. He left Boston and returned to his native Miami, where he served as dean of the University of Miami's School of International Studies. Currently, he is the special assistant to the provost. Had he not been in the elevator accident, Gomez believes, he would have become a university president, as he had planned. But now he says he isn't physically capable.

Gomez is 49 years old, and when he travels he has to wear support hose. Because he's had a couple of bouts of phlebitis, he injects anticoagulants into his leg to prevent blood clots. He can't sit still for long periods of time, and some days he has to walk with a cane. The accident caused herniated and slipped discs in his back, but doctors say they can't operate because they might damage his leg.

If he hears a strange noise or feels an out-of-the-ordinary movement when he's on an elevator, Gomez panics. The nightmares where he's back on the elevator reliving the accident occur less and less. Still, some days he can't get on an elevator at all. "My mind just won't let me," he says.

Around the same time as Gomez's accident, Texas created an elevator safety advisory board. But the state didn't have any power to enforce elevator inspections.

Two years ago, Representative Charlie Geren, a Republican from Fort Worth, authored House Bill 656 to amend the Texas Health and Safety Code, and require elevators to be annually inspected. "Some building owners had never had their elevators inspected at all," Geren says.

Geren's legislation failed. This year the bill passed in the Texas House but wasn't signed. However, in June, Senate Bill 279, which incorporated most of Geren's bill, was signed into law. "Mine was more powerful," Geren says.

The number of Texas elevators inspected has more than doubled in the last three years, from about 15,000 in 2000 to nearly 33,000 the department registered this past fiscal year. This excludes elevators in federal buildings, says the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation's Ketchum, because state law isn't applicable to U.S. property. It also excludes buildings in Houston, which are exempt from state law. State law also grants exemptions to other buildings such as factories, where elevators are mostly used by employees only.

Before the new law went into effect, about a month ago on September 1, Texas elevator inspectors were inspecting elevators with the outdated 1994 Society of Mechanical Engineers elevator code book. Currently, inspectors use the 2002 edition.

In other states, elevator inspectors report having shut down thousands of unsafe elevators. Texas inspectors don't do that, says Ketchum. The department doesn't have any records of a Texas elevator being shut down.

However, if an elevator provides an immediate danger to the public, or the elevator hasn't been inspected for more than two years -- and the building owner has been repeatedly notified that it needs to be inspected and repaired -- the state can issue an emergency order to shut the elevator down. But that hasn't happened either, Ketchum says.

If a Texas elevator isn't inspected, it isn't sealed off or forced to stop running. The department doesn't issue that building a certificate. State law allows the department to fine building owners up to $5,000 per day, per safety code violation. But the fines don't seem to make a big difference. Looking at 169 pages of fines issued, in several instances elevators were not inspected for four to six years.

"The fine is cheaper than getting it inspected," Quackenbush says. "It's gonna cost $4,000 to get it fixed. And the fine is only $1,000. Well, I'll pay the $1,000 and maybe they won't catch me again for four or five years."

The department requires building owners to report accidents involving serious bodily injury within 48 hours, Ketchum says. Records are not thorough. The state has more than 300 elevator-related accident reports, which Ketchum says document all elevator fatalities and injuries in Texas for the last ten years. For Houston, the state has on file only 11 reports of minor accidents occurring at Foley's, the doctor's decapitation and an incident August 26 where 14 people spent an hour trapped in an elevator at IntraCare Hospital, a psychiatric facility in the Texas Medical Center. In the IntraCare elevator accident, a few people had broken bones, and most complained of neck and back pain. Not one of the many local personal injury lawsuits involving elevator accidents is on file at the department.

Ketchum explains the dearth of documentation by saying that Houston is out of the state's jurisdiction, therefore Houston officials keep accident records. City officials say they don't keep accident reports, they send them to the state, because the state conducts accident investigations.

Houston employs only one elevator inspector, and he doesn't inspect elevators. Individual building owners hire private elevator inspection companies. The city inspector, Mike Dorosk, files annual inspection reports and ensures that the more than 8,200 elevators inside city limits get inspected. "If one goes overdue, we're gonna know. And it's not going to be six months or six years later," says Dan Pruitt, spokesperson for Houston's Code Enforcement division. "We go to greater lengths to ensure elevator safety than any other city in the state. The overwhelming majority of other cities around the state of Texas have no idea whether elevators are being inspected or not. They don't have any records whatsoever."

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