• Flunking an inspection does not necessarily mean the elevator is unsafe.
• Never mind the date on inspection certificates, inspectors were at Marina City a year ago.

By Steven Dahlman

12-May-09 – As Marina City gets its elevators inspected today, the City of Chicago is disputing some of the claims made by the Chicago Tribune about inspections. Last week, the Tribune reported that of 20,000 elevators that by law need to be inspected every year, 70 percent had not been inspected in the past year and “a handful” had not been looked at since 2001.

“The Tribune thing is a little blown out of proportion,” says Bill McCaffrey, Director of Public Affairs for the Department of Buildings. “They know there’s only 13,000 elevators and yet they insist on putting 20,000 in their headlines.”

According to the Department of Buildings web site, there are “approximately twenty-two thousand elevators and moving conveyances in the City of Chicago,” but “moving conveyances” includes escalators, dumbwaiters, moving walks, material handling devices, personnel hoists, vertical platforms, and mechanical amusement rides.

McCaffrey says the list of buildings inspectors have not been to is shorter than what the Tribune suggests because many buildings have dual addresses.

“They know we’ve been out there many other times, closing complaints out.”

Adding to the confusion is the fact that certificates of inspection, displayed in each elevator car, are not issued until all of the building’s elevators have passed inspection at the same time.

“So if we go to Marina City and there’s one elevator with one problem – and that problem can simply be a light bulb burned out on one of the buttons when you push it – you will not get new certificates for all of the elevators.”

The computer system in use by the Department of Buildings, says McCaffrey, was designed 8-10 years ago and not specifically to track elevator inspections. Those, he says, have been “shoe-horned into this database system.”

Each tower at Marina City has two elevators serving residential floors 21-40, two elevators serving floors 41-61, and a freight elevator. The certificate of inspection in each elevator says they were last inspected on March 26, 2004, but they were actually inspected on March 21, 2008. Two defective hoist ropes were replaced, one for elevator #4 in the east tower and the other for elevator #2 in the west tower. Originally manufactured by Otis Elevator Company, the units were modernized by ThyssenKrupp Elevator. McCaffrey says building inspectors have probably been to Marina City more than other buildings because it is a high-rise in the central business district.

“If you look at what the city will focus on in terms of safety, an elevator in a four-story building that has eight units, versus an elevator in Aon Building or in Trump Tower or Sears Tower, just the volume of passengers, the use that the system gets, the maintenance that’s required to keep it going, all of those have to come into play. We have to prioritize our inspection schedule.”

The last time the city was at Marina City to respond to a complaint was in September 2005. “But we went out there and there wasn’t any action warranted. The elevator was repaired before we got there. Whatever the hiccup was in the elevator, it was addressed, it was fixed. Or it was a slight mechanical error for a minute, and there’s not much you can do there.”

McCaffrey says most elevator systems are well-maintained “because the building owner understands their liability if something goes wrong.”

City to farm out inspections

Faced with a growing number of elevators and only ten inspectors, the city is changing the law that requires annual inspection. They will perform an inspection one year but the building will be allowed to hire a third-party inspector the next two years.

“So if we went to Marina City this year and did an inspection, in 2010 and 2011, we would allow the third party inspector to look at it, document the conditions just like we would. Obviously, if there’s anything wrong, the building owner still has to fix it and then we would return in 2012.”

McCaffrey says they are more concerned with elevators in new buildings, where elevators are most vulnerable. “If you look at just the building boom in the last eight years, we have made sure that every new elevator system is up to code and operating safely before anybody is allowed to use that elevator.”

If there are no violations with any of its elevators, it can still take several weeks for a property owner or manager to receive new inspection certificates. But even a single violation, no matter how minor, can slow that down.

The city would like to see that changed, so that a certificate could be issued to each elevator that passed inspection.

An elevator not passing inspection, stresses McCaffrey, is not necessarily unsafe. “That’s a question the Tribune had was, are these elevators unsafe? The answer is no. There was some concern, something that had to be addressed but not enough to shut the elevator down.”

It’s the same with any building, he says. “We’ll go out and say, this is a code violation, you need to fix this situation, but we don’t evacuate the building. The elevators are fine. They’re working, they’re operating, they’re safe. Are there some things we’ve gone out there that identified that need to be addressed? Yes, and it is the building owner’s responsibility to address those to bring the elevator up to compliance.”

Marina City inspections to take most of two days Elevators in the east tower at Marina City will be inspected on Tuesday from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Elevators in the west tower will be inspected on May 19. While the residential property manager at Marina City, Draper & Kramer Inc., warns residents to expect 20-minute delays, McCaffrey says only a couple elevators at a time should be out of service during the inspections. “When elevators are serviced, we don’t shut them all down at the same time. But it is an inconvenience for the occupants of the building – but it’s a necessary inconvenience.” If for some reason every elevator has to be shut down at the same time, McCaffrey says it will just be for a couple of hours.

Photos: Elevator lobby on 27th floor of Marina City residential tower. Buttons in freight elevator at Marina City.