By James Halpin
The Citizens’ Voice
WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — State law does not require regular inspections of an elevator door safety feature that has been known to fail in the past — and may be to blame for the deaths of a correctional officer and an inmate at the Luzerne County Correctional Facility last week.
The importance of the load bearing devices, known as gibs, was highlighted two years ago in an incident that led to a serious injury and an impending lawsuit.
New Jersey resident Elisabeth A. Scotland leaned against an elevator door at Fenway Park in Boston and fell 25 feet down the elevator shaft when the door hinged open at the top. County officials have described a similar scenario when describing the elevator door opening at the county jail last week which led to the 59-foot fall that killed Corrections Officer Kristopher Moules, 25, of Larksville, and inmate Timothy Darnell Gilliam Jr., 27, of Wilkes-Barre.
Scotland, who was seriously injured but survived her fall, has a pending lawsuit against the Fenway Sports Group as well as the Otis Elevator Co., alleging they failed to properly install the elevator and caused the door to “swing open like a dog door.” The complaint alleges the gibs, safety device intended to keep the door from opening as it did, were insufficiently installed.
Reached Monday, Scotland’s Boston-based attorney, Patrick T. Jones, said he was not aware of many other similar cases involving Otis Elevators — the brand in use at the Luzerne County jail — but he declined to discuss the case for attribution.
Jodi Golia Hynes, a spokewoman for Otis — which has filed suit blaming contractors for the Boston fall — said, “Although the elevator involved at Luzerne County Jail was originally manufactured by Otis, the service and maintenance is handled by another company, and the gib involved does not appear to be an Otis part.”
“There is nothing more important to Otis than the safety of our employees, customers, and the people who rely on our products every day,” Hynes added. “Our thoughts are with those affected by this situation.”
County Manager David Pedri said Monday that he did not yet know what caused the mishap at the jail and that he was still awaiting an evaluation report from West Chester-based elevator expert Richard A. Kennedy. Workers were expected to return to the jail, which remains locked down, today to conduct repairs, he said.
While the official cause of the incident remains under investigation, a California-based elevator expert, Technology Litigation Corp.'s chief executive and president Stephen Carr, said the gibs’ tendency for failure has prompted him to raise the issue as a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Codes Development Committee.
“This is a common problem in prisons -- places where there’s rough behavior,” Carr said, noting the similarities between the incident here and yet another similar incident.
Carr cited the fall of Thomas A. Peck II. Peck was paralyzed after plummeting down an elevator shaft during a struggle with deputies at the Clark County Jail in Ohio in May 2008.
He cited several other similar cases, including an elderly man who fell to his death after hitting an elevator door with a scooter and a little boy fatally falling down a shaft after leaning against an elevator door at a low-income high-rise.
“I’ve had too many cases where they gave way,” he said.
The issue, Carr said, is that the sliding elevator doors run on a track and are held in place by gibs — typically pieces of plastic with some metal to protect against fire.
Carr said that while sometimes the gibs lose their strength because of maintenance or installation errors, he feels they need to be made stronger in the first place.
Pedri has previously said the elevator underwent a load test just days before the tragedy and that the state Department of Labor and Industry inspected it in April, finding only one deficiency due to debris under the elevator car that was later remedied.
Carr said he didn’t know specifics about the inspection conducted, but that testing the gibs is not part of the recommended testing procedure.
“You can bet they didn’t check this,” Carr said. “That’s one of our real deficiencies -- it doesn’t get tested.”
David Eckelmann, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, confirmed state law requires elevator doors to withstand 250 pounds of constant force and calls for checks of the gibs’ alignment but does not require regular inspections of the doors’ ability to withstand pressure.
“The load-bearing aspect of the gibs is tested when it is first installed but on (subsequent) routine inspections, it is not inspected for that,” Eckelmann said.
Carr said the ASME should review the standards it sets to determine whether it makes sense to test gibs to gauge the load-bearing capabilities of the doors they support. He said he is thinking about raising the issue at the committee’s next meeting.
“Testing is destructive — if it doesn’t pass, you break it,” Carr said. “But it should be tested, it seems to me, and it’s not.”