In his 34 years with the New York Fire Department, Captain James Melvin has seen his share of stuck elevators, but he had never witnessed anything quite like what happened on Sunday on Staten Island.
Two construction workers were stuck in an elevator that was filling with water, Melvin explained. By the time firefighters arrived, the water level had risen as high as the two trapped men’s necks.
“We’ve had plenty of elevator emergencies, but never one that’s sinking in water,” Melvin said.
The men were working in the former Staten Island Hotel, which is being renovated into an assisted-living residence for older people.
At about 9am, the two workers were riding in the elevator and discovered that the door did not open. The men, Edward Tyler and Wendell Admaker, began to hit the buttons for various floors in the hope that the doors on one of them would work.
“They figured they’d try the basement level,” Melvin said.
On another day, that would probably have been fine, but the rainfall on Sunday had led to severe flooding in the basement. And when the elevator neared the basement level, “it hit water and started sinking slowly, until it sank to the bottom of the shaft,” Melvin said.
With a cellphone the men reached the fire department. While neither knew the precise address of the building, they said it was near the intersection of Richmond Avenue and Christopher Lane.
When firefighters finally found them, about an hour after their initial call, the two men were standing atop the plastic cart they had been using to transport supplies between floors. Even with the cart’s added height, the water was up to their necks, and about 1m from the elevator’s ceiling, Melvin said.
The water level “was going up, and then coming down, and going up a little more,” Melvin said.
The rescue involved inserting a narrow ladder into the elevator from above, through the emergency hatch, he said.
Tyler and Amaker were not hurt and went back to the firehouse.
“We let them clean up in our facilities because we assumed that the water might have been sewer water,” Melvin said.
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