Friday, May 24, 2013
Sharjah Whenever May takes the lift in her apartment building, she can’t help but worry,
The building, after all, is one of the oldest in the Al Nahda area and all three lifts are in bad shape, according to tenants.
“I get scared every time I use our lift. I’m always afraid because I’m unsure if I’ll come out alive or not,” May, 30, a Filipino engineer, told Gulf News.
May said the lift has a record of stopping in midair and locking riders inside for a few minutes.
“One time I was inside along with four other male tenants. On our way up, the lift came to a halt, the light went off. We tried to open the door and we saw we were in between the second and third floor, but there was no way we could go out.”
“I was really scared then because I felt really vulnerable. I just hugged myself while the men tried their best to get us out of the lift. We were there for about 15 minutes,” she said.
Rogelio Rico, an architect who lives in the same building, said all elevator rides in that building are always bumpy.
“It feels like the lift is literally being shaken by someone. You feel like you’re inside a ship and the waves are pounding on it,” Rico, 42, said. “In many instances, the door won’t shut. Or worse, from outside, we’d always hear people banging the elevator doors and screaming for help from inside. That’s a sign someone got stuck again and the cycle just repeats,” he added.
Both tenants said what they fear the most is if the elevator cable suddenly snaps, causing the lift to fall to the ground. Their fears, however, are not unfounded.
In August 2012, an Iraqi family, including their four-year-old son, sustained serious injuries when their lift plunged from the seventh floor down to the basement of a 15-year-old building. Police said the fall was due to a broken cable.
Following the incident, Sharjah Municipality reportedly decided to make annual elevator maintenance mandatory for commercial and residential buildings.
All maintenance should only be made with a company approved by Civil Defence.
But another lift fell three months later.
On December 31, nine people, including four children, were injured when their lift plummeted to the ground from the sixth floor of a building in Al Khan area. Sharjah police said the elevator fell because its cable snapped.
Mohammad Zameer, Technical Manager at Al Jar International Elevator, said elevators are inherently safe to use unless otherwise they are poorly maintained. Zameer’s company supplies, installs, maintains, repairs and modernizes lifts, escalators, and moving walkways around the country.
“If the lift maintenance is done in the proper way, you can avoid accidents. A lift may fall if it is maintained by non-standard companies. This could happen if the maintenance company is careless,” Zameer told Gulf News.
“If we take for example the ropes, which are a major part of the elevator, if we find even just a small damage, we recommend that all the ropes be replaced right away,” Zameer added.
If the building management refuses to act on the problem, Zameer said they deactivate the lift as per their policy until the problem is resolved. The same policy is being followed by ATES, an engineering company that services around 400 elevators in the UAE.
Santhosh Kumar, who works as a technical manager of the elevator division at ATES, told Gulf News that there’s no room for complacency when it comes to ensuring passengers.
“If even a small damage is found in just one cable, we recommend that all the ropes be replaced. It is important that all the cables take the same load. If one cable is damaged, the other cables will have disproportionate load and this could affect elevator balance,” Kumar told Gulf News.
Both safety experts recommended proper preventive maintenance to be done regularly or at least once a month.
“Just as regular maintenance is needed for cars, it is also very important for lifts. But lifts act more like a taxi because it carries passengers. There is a third party at risk,” Zameer said.
A lift cable’s average lifespan depends on its usage and maintenance. A 10-storey commercial building, for example, whose lifts are properly maintained, will have no cable problems for about 10 years. The older the building, though, the more it will need maintenance.
“If the lift is very old, then the safety condition becomes poor. If a lift is more than 15 years old, it has to be modernized,” Zameer said. Modernization means replacing all the old components of the lift with new ones.
About 25 per cent of the buildings here in the UAE are between 15 to 20 years old and their lifts need to be modernized, according to Zameer. But he said not all clients are agreeable to this.
“There are two types of clients: the landlords, who are always interested in keeping the building in good condition, and the real estate [agencies], almost half of whom don’t care about getting their building elevators properly maintained,” Zameer said.
Zameer said that four out of every 10 clients in the UAE represent real estate agencies, half of which are a source of most headaches of maintenance companies as they often ignore the maintenance needs of their lifts.
Kumar said the problem gets compounded when some building managers compromise safety over maintenance costs by hiring non-qualified technicians in fixing problems with their lifts.
“There are many old elevators still in operation in different areas in Dubai and Sharjah with no AMC (annual maintenance contracts). If there are problems in these elevators, they call any technician to repair the problem. But the danger here is that they are not able to do a comprehensive inspection of these elevators,” Kumar said.
“Clients are not ready to spend on proper preventive maintenance. Sadly, they are not considering the seriousness of the issue,” he added.
By Janice Ponce de Leon ?and Jumana Khamis Staff Reporters
Gulf News 2013. All rights reserved.
