An elevator stoppage in the Hall building left around 20 people hanging for approximately 20 minutes on Monday morning.
Psychology and geography student Victoria Curl had stepped into the descending elevator on the ground floor of the building around 10 a.m. on Monday morning while on her way to class. Curl said they had descended a few feet when the elevator jolted to a stop. “There was this crashing, and all this stuff came down from the ceiling, like dust,” she said. “So we were stuck there. We called the security guy and he said he would send someone, so we waited for half an hour.”
The elevator was stuck between the ground floor and the basement, having been boarded with people on the ground floor before heading downwards. The drop was only a few feet, according to Curl, but “you still felt like you were crashing.”
“You couldn’t move, it was so hot, it was just disgusting,” Curl said of her experience. Firefighters soon arrived on the scene to pull the stranded people out because the elevator was not level with the ground, she said.
Security then asked to see identification from those involved in order to document who was involved in the incident, a standard procedure according to university spokesperson Chris Mota.
No one in the elevator panicked, though. “It was actually kind of funny because everyone was laughing and we were talking about cannibalism,” Curl joked. “We were just trying to make the best of it I guess. I think a few people felt a little claustrophobic.”
“The [security guard] told us that he was sending someone as soon as possible so we knew it wasn’t hopeless. We weren’t going to be stuck there forever,” she said.
Mota said there were 18 people caught in the elevator for 18 minutes, according to the incident report filed by security, but could not confirm the cause of the stoppage by press time.
– With files from Alyssa Tremblay