One housing block, Wendover in South East London, saw firefighters attending to rescue people from lifts on 27 occasions in the past 12 months. The fire service has announced today that councils and businesses that persistently make non-emergency lift call-outs will face a GB pound 290 fine from the third incident within a 12-month period.
In the last year, London Fire Brigade attended 6,430 lift rescues, but only 57 of these were said to be emergencies — where there is a genuine medical emergency facing the person or people stuck in the lift. The Brigade still wants to be called to such incidents, but they are attempting to reduce the total amount of lift rescues they have to attend.
The ten worst offenders in the past 12 months have between them seen 167 non-emergency call-outs for lift rescues:
In November 2009 the annual call-out figure for these types of rescues stood at 13,823 — a reduction of around 7,400 call-outs a year and equivalent to GB pound 2m a year in resources and time saved. They now use a call filtering system on 999 calls in order to allow operators to send calls on to other relevant people who can deal with a non-emergency situation — such as lift engineers.
Earlier this year, London’s mayor and the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority authorised the closure of ten fire stations in order to find additional savings of GB pound 28.8m in the next two years. LFEPA chairman James Cleverly has welcomed this latest reduction, but would like to see building owners doing more:
It is encouraging to see a reduction in lift call outs, however, firefighters are still attending 17 lift rescues each day. We hope this tough new charging scheme will send a clear message to building owners that this is not acceptable.
As well as being costly for the fire service, being trapped in a lift can be frightening and uncomfortable which is why we’re calling on building owners to take responsibility and sort their shoddy lifts out.
Firefighters will always attend a call out where it is a real emergency but in many of these cases it should be up to the person in charge of the building whose lift has broken down, to fix the problem.
The Brigade’s ability to reduce non-emergency call-outs will be particularly crucial in the next few years, since firefighter numbers are set to be reduced by 550. It remains to be seen whether financial penalties assist in further reducing lift call-outs.
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This is just silly, why are people calling emergency numbers in the first place? Most elevators here in the US have an emergency alarm button that will alert building maintenance personnel. I used to work in a building that had an elevator get stuck every few weeks. We just got used to it and would pry the doors open, step out and take the stairs. If you were stuck just right and it was too high to climb out then you’d hit the button and the maintenance guys would come with a ladder. This just sounds like a case of… Read more »
True, safeNsane. Either they weren’t thinking, or they lost their bearings and simply panicked. Perhaps buildings should post noticed in the elevators, in case of stoppage, informing them what they should do.
I think some strict policy has to be enforced. Such pranksters must be punished for their wrong doings. These kinds of frivolities are not expected from responsible citizens. They should realize that in the time of real crisis or disaster they themselves may get stuck and some one considers their call as false alarm.
For the idiots who are doing this for fun, will fining the council stop them? Passing the fines along to the actual offenders might not be possible and this initiative will see the brigade wasting their efforts on call outs and councils wasting valuable monies on fines.
All lifts should have a call button that takes them to an arc/ maintenance person, so they can be calmed down/ reassured that they are going to be helped.
I wonder if the problem here is with incapable maintenance or facilities staff then? Because there’s not a lift in the world that doesn’t have an emergency alarm button, but do the staff in the building then not know the process for getting people freed, panic, and call the fire service?
As i wrote in another comment, is it the facilities/maintenance manager making the frequent calls or the people in the lift? If you were stuck, the alarm button received no response, what would you do? Call the fire service probably, right? As you say, these lifts should all be linked directly to an ARC that can send a lift maintenance company.