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Nation's College Elevators Scrutinized - washingtonpost.com

Nation's College Elevators Scrutinized - washingtonpost.com
Andy Jones  |  by www.pitchforkmedia.com. All rights reserved. 25.01 | 0:08

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Like many students at the country's largest college campus, Melissa Nail now thinks twice before boarding crowded elevator cars.
It was on her campus three months ago that an 18-year-old freshman was killed while trying to wriggle out of an overcrowded dorm elevator that was stuck between floors.

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jpg"/-->

Ohio State University freshman Melissa Nail, 18, of Columbus stands in front of Park Hall in Columbus, Ohio, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2007. Nail lives on the sixth floor of Park Hall just around the corner from Stradley Hall, where freshman Andrew Polakowski, of Erie, Pa.

, was pinned and killed when he tried to crawl out of an elevator car that stalled Oct. 20. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato) (Kiichiro Sato - AP)

"I've always had a little bit of a fear of the elevators and definitely now I just don't get into overcrowded ones," said Nail, 18, a freshman at Ohio State University.


While getting trapped in an OSU elevator is uncommon, that fear is not completely out of place, according to an Associated Press review of hundreds of pages of elevator service reports.
Records from November 2003 through October 2006 showed technicians responding to about 1,100 calls for service for everything from stuck cars to cell phones dropped down the shaft of the school's 29 regularly used elevators.
Most of the complaints involved stalled cars, including 230 reports of trapped passengers.

One in every five service calls on malfunctioning dorm elevators involve someone trapped inside.
The problems aren't unusual for a campus the size of Ohio State _ with an enrollment of 51,818 _ or for elevators used frequently in a residential setting, said Norman Martin, the state's top elevator inspector. But the data enforces the need for students to use and ride elevators responsibly, Martin said.


"It's not playground equipment _ it needs to be respected," he said.
Campus elevators are subject to far more misuse than elevators in commercial buildings and other nonresidential facilities, said Jeff Cooper, elevator system specialist at Purdue University.
"They're high-use environments," said Cooper, founder of Elevator U, a national campus elevator safety association that counts among its members university facility managers, consultants, vendors and others with ties to the industry.


Nationally, there were 70 elevator-related deaths from 2001 through 2006, and about 8,800 elevator-related injuries in 2005, according to the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission.

Such accidents are extremely rare when measured against the billions of elevator runs the industry estimates each year.
Elevator safety on campus came under the spotlight when Ohio State freshman Andrew Polakowski, of Erie, Pa., suffocated Oct.

20 as he tried to leave a car that was stuck between floors. The elevator moved and he was pinned.

Read more on by www.pitchforkmedia.com. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Ohio State, Elevator Safety, Park Hall, Ohio State University, Andrew Polakowski, Melissa Nail, State University
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