En Hospital de Colombia más de dos horas atrapados en ascensor

Cinco personas permanecieron dos horas y media atrapadas en un ascensor del Hospital El Pueblito de Barranquilla. La emergencia se registró a las 9 y 30 de la mañana de este lunes.

Los afectadas llegaron al centro asistencial a unas terapias pero cuando de subieron al ascensor se dañó entre el primer y segundo piso.

Cuatro mujeres y un camillero vivieron los momentos más angustiosos de sus vidas porque duraron dos horas y media atrapadas.

"Veníamos a unas terapias, utilizamos el ascensor porque mi abuela tiene unas limitaciones físicas y entre el primer y segundo piso se dañó. De inmediato llamamos para que nos auxiliaran, nos dijeron que no había personal técnico en el Hospital, llamamos a la Policía en dos ocasiones para que mandaran una patrulla y tampoco vino", contó una afectada.

Mientras estuvieron las dos horas y media en el ascensor sufrieron de taquicardia y de la presión.

"Como es posible que después de tanto tiempo llegó un técnico para poder rescatarnos", manifestó.

Finalmente las mujeres y el camillero recibieron una atención médica cuando salieron del ascensor.

Child fall down by an escalator in China

The shocking moment a two-year-old boy slips from an escalator handrail and plummets TWO FLOORS to the ground

A two-year-old boy has miraculously survived falling from the handrail of an escalator at a shopping centre in Dongguan, in southern China.  The CCTV footage starts with an older boy stepping on to the escalator while the toddler waits at the top. The younger boy then grabs hold of the handrail and pulls himself up.  After managing to hang on to the handrail briefly, he slips and falls off, plunging to the floor of the shopping centre below. 

Historic 1926 Otis Manually Controlled Otis Traction Elevator

Some things that we should never do during installing hydraulics elevators

Elevators: San Nicolás Building

En caída Libre por el Hueco de Un Ascensor

The elevators and the accidents

The incidents were tragic but also very rare. According to ConsumerWatch.com, “U.S. elevators make 18 billion passenger trips per year.” Those trips result in about 27 deaths annually, according to estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. That works out to a fatality rate of 0.00000015% per trip.

Injuries and deaths are so uncommon that there isn’t much written about them in the medical literature. A 2009 report in Occupational Health and Safety notes that people who install and maintain elevators may become injured in a variety of ways, including, “falls, electrical shocks, muscle strains and other injuries related to lockout/tagout, confined spaces, scaffolds, cranes, rigging, hoisting and heavy equipment.”

The safety profile for passengers is much better. “Because of the intricate, redundant and regulated safety features built in to every elevator, catastrophes are rare outside of movies and TV,” according to the report. So-called rope elevators require only one woven steel cable, but they usually have four to eight cables just in case. In addition, elevators are equipped with “automatic braking systems” that are backed up by “electromagnetic brakes.” Finally, the report notes, “at the bottom of the shaft is a heavy-duty shock absorber system designed to save passengers if all else fails.”

The Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine has a case report of a 48-year-old elevator maintenance worker who died when an unfinished elevator suddenly dropped about 10 feet. A team of doctors and a physicist in Europe concluded that the initial drop wasn’t necessarily fatal. But because the elevator car was much heavier than the man, it reached the bottom first and transferred kinetic energy to the man when he hit the floor – catapulting him about 20 feet back into the air. His fall from that height crushed his skull and caused his brain to hemorrhage, the team reported.

If an escalator is an option, it might be an even safer way to go. A 2008 study in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention examined 14 years' worth of data on escalator injuries sustained by senior citizens in the U.S. Researchers tallied nearly 40,000 escalator-related injuries among the study population (average age 80.1 years) and calculated that the injury rate was 7.8 per 100,000 -- but there were no deaths.

A 2006 report in the journal Pediatrics found that children were generally safe on escalators as well, with an injury rate among 0-to-19-year-olds of 2.6 per 100,000. Children under 5 were most likely to be hurt, though their injury rate was only 4.8 per 100,000. More than half of the injuries observed over the 13-year period studied were a result of falls. There were no reports of fatalities, but 833 of the roughly 26,000 injuries involved amputations or avulsions.

Elevator plunges are rare because brakes and cables provide fail-safe protections

How many times a day do you step into an elevator? Many people live and work 10, 20 or even more stories above the ground. Yet rarely do you think about complicated electromechanical systems that glides you up and down, lest your mind wander to thoughts of a Tower of Terror-like plunge into the subbasement.

If you understood exactly what’s stopping you from plunging 500 feet into the subbasement, would you be more or less comfortable riding an elevator? There’s only one way to find out.

Let’s begin with the cables. Most elevators feature between two and eight woven steel cables. Elevator technicians refer to them as “ropes,” a reference to their 19th-century hemp predecessors. The number of ropes in a given elevator depends on something called a “factor of safety.” If the factor of safety, set by building codes, is 12 for a particular building, that means the combined strength of the ropes must be adequate to hold 12 times the mass of a fully loaded car. In effect, each rope can hold more than the weight of the car.

Individual cables occasionally fail, but it takes a freak event to sever all of them. In 1945, a B-25 bomber crashed into the Empire State Building, slicing through all of the cables on an elevator. The lone passenger survived the fall from the 79th floor because the cables beneath the cab slowed her descent and cushioned her landing. The planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, also sliced the elevator cables, and some of the victims plunged to their deaths.

Elevator engineers worry about more than just cable failures: The electronics, the pulley systems and other features must be working to ensure safe travel.

“Before each run, the elevator system checks the ‘safety chain,’ ” notes Daryl Marvin, director of innovation at Otis Elevator, the world’s largest elevator maker. (He was referring not to a physical chain but to a series of checks the elevator performs automatically.) “If anything goes wrong — the door is open, the elevator detects an overspeed or someone presses an emergency stop button — the system automatically cuts power to the motor and applies the brake.”

Elevators have two or three types of brakes. If there’s an error in the safety chain, a clamp closes on the pulley above the car, preventing the elevator from moving. Unlike an automobile brake, which has to be depressed to engage, the elevator brake is clamped down unless power is supplied to release it. That means that any loss of power, either due to a system error or an electrical grid failure, will set off the motor brake.

The safety check and the motor brake have failed on occasion, but negligence is the usual cause of accidents. In 2011, for example, an elevator in a Manhattan office building surged upward with the door still open, killing a 41-year-old advertising executive. An investigation showed that maintenance workers who disabled the safety chain during repairs forgot to reset the system.

Elevators also have a safety brake that is attached to the underside of the car. This is the innovation that made the passenger elevator possible when it was unveiled at the 1853-54 World’s Fair in New York.

By Brian Palmer, Published: June 10