Now that summer is over, I was hoping that new stories about elevator safety issues would start slowing down. You know what I’m talking about – breakdowns in Washington, D.C. and constantly slow / broken elevators in Manhattan subway stations. When it comes to elevator safety, these issues are paramount, especially when considering people who cannot use stairs due to injury or disability. However much I wished there wasn’t another story about these issues, it seems that Iowa discovered a trove of backlogged elevator inspections.

The amount of backlogged inspections – revealed in a story from RadioIowa – is pretty damning of authorities in the state:

“… there were nearly 10,000 elevators and escalators in Iowa which are, by law, to be inspected every year. Auditors randomly chose 100 elevators and found 68 hadn’t been inspected in the past year.  One…elevator — at Sparboe Foods in Hampton — hadn’t been inspected for nearly nine years. An elevator in a Waterloo parking garage hadn’t been inspected for nearly three years, according to the audit.”

The article says that the number of state elevator inspectors is currently being added to, primarily to ensure that every elevator gets inspected at least once a year. The current State Labor Commissioner Michael Mauro in Iowa said in the story that there are also private companies hired by the state to aid in these efforts as well:

“We have elevator inspectors located across the state,” Mauro says. “And we also use private companies who are attempting to inspect all the elevators on a yearly basis and that’s our goal and we’re moving toward that goal.” 

The current plan for the commissioner is to make sure that the backlog of inspections is completed by the end of the year. No matter if that actually occurs, it is still crucial that you insist that elevators you use by inspected by proper officials. Elevator safety is a serious concern and if more states keep having issues like this, there may be a need for sweeping overhauls.

Stairlifts and elevators are two tools that serve essentially the same purpose in totally different ways. Elevators are usually built into shafts crafted in specific sections of a building and operate within this enclosed case by using cabins as a transport device for riders. In contrast, stairlifts are rarely fully enclosed and offer a way for people in wheelchairs to get up and down stairs without any trouble. As always, there are exceptions to these descriptions, but in general, these are the main differences between stairlifts and elevators.

So can one be substituted for the other? One town council in England thinks so. According to BBC News, stairlifts will be taking the place of elevators in one building, at least for the time being:

“Residents of a 15-storey tower block in Paisley have raised concerns over council plans to replace a broken lift with 14 stairlifts. The stairlifts are being installed at Rowan Court to ferry residents on odd floors to the even floors where the lift is working. Renfrewshire Council said it is a temporary measure, while repair work is carried out.”

The story says that the concerns are generally the safety measures and the costs. Also, there is only one elevator currently running that won’t be fixed until November. So, as a measure to help residents who cannot make their way up and down stairs, 14 stair lifts are being put in:

“In the meantime Renfrewshire Council has decided to fit 14 stairlifts, at a cost of £15,000. Residents said it is a waste of money and they have called on the council to install a new lift as soon as possible. [A] spokeswoman said that the lifts had been due to be refurbished and that stairlifts would have been installed as standard practice while that work was going on.”

What do you think about this? Can stairlifts replace elevators, even for a short amount of time?

Keeping up with elevator renovations is not only essential to following the Americans with Disabilities Act, but also crucial in improving safety and conditions for those who absolutely need to use them. This is totally true when it comes to public places where many people flow in and out on a daily basis, especially in train stations. In this blog, I have written at length about elevator problems in various metropolitan subway areas before, so you know exactly how difficult it can be to find appropriate lift service in some stations for the disabled.

One county in Montgomery County, Washington, D.C., is looking to install a series of elevators to ease congestion and difficult situations in the Bethesda Metro station, says a story in the Washington Post. However helpful this project might be, one group is pushing to get it moved along faster:

“A transit advocacy group in Montgomery County wants new elevators put in sooner than scheduled at Bethesda Metro station because members worry that plans to install new escalators will face hiccups and cause severe crowding and long lines. Metro plans to tear out the old, balky escalators and put in three new ones at the station’s north entrance. But that work won’t start until 2014.”

The possible breakdown of transit escalators is the major concern, with the advocacy group saying that lines could spell huge delays for riders. Some might say that the enormity of the $60 million project needs to be thoroughly planned out, so a start date in 2014 isn’t the worst case scenario. The elevator lines are pretty intense:

“The elevators would give riders access to the Purple Line and Metro’s Red Line from Elm Street. The elevators would take riders down to the Purple Line, which will run partially underground in downtown Bethesda, and to Metro’s Red Line. The Red Line would be about 10 stories below the Purple Line underground.”

Obviously, the sooner these elevators get put in, the sooner this train station becomes more accessible. I think it’s worth the wait to ensure that these elevator installations are completed properly.

Elevators are a major part of everyday life for many people, especially those who work in high rise buildings or have a disability that affects one’s ability to ascend stairs. For everyone else, elevators still have a profound effect on the way we travel, even if we only use them once a month. Whatever your relationship with elevators, you may think that they will change over the years with the advances in technology getting more and more advanced.

That assumption may go beyond topics like double decker elevators and enhanced lift systems like we have mentioned in this blog. Many think that elevators have the ability to one day travel between this world and the space outside our atmosphere. This is nothing new to readers of this blog, who have read about annual space elevator conventions. Before, this idea seemed like a pipe dream, but now many people are asking the tough questions.

According to a story from PCWorld, the most recent convention experts were hit with some big questions:

“Might solar energy provide the power needed to send cars up a space elevator? Could you build one fat elevator and split it into two? Can as many as six cars travel up and down a space elevator? ‘These are ideas we want to hear and we want people to follow up on,’ said Bryan Laubscher, one of the leading space elevator enthusiasts and principle at Odysseus Technologies, a company working on high-strength materials.”

The questions posed were used as a starting point for discussions about how a space elevator would actually work. Could operational costs of such an elevator be low enough to enable a company to run them? What would these costs be? How would solar panels factor in to help with energy in the elevators?

These may not be questions you hear about residential elevators and commercial elevators every day, but one day we might ride up to space as easily as get to that observation deck in New York City.