Hotel

12

Three things should have saved number four elevator from disaster.

One was an overspeed governor on the elevator car. It was set to trip when the car's speed exceeded a prescribed safety limit.

On number four - though the defect had not been noticed - the governor was operating late.

A second device comprised four safety clamps. Immediately the governor tripped, these should have seized the elevator guide rails, halting the car. in fact, on one side of the car two clamps held. But on the other side - due to delayed response of the governor, and because the machinery was old and weakened - the clamps failed.

Even then, prompt operation of an emergency control inside the elevator car might have averted tragedy. This was a single red button. Its purpose, when depressed, was to cut off all electric power, freezing the car. In modern elevators the emergency button was located high, and plainly in view. In the St. Gregory's cars, and many others, it was positioned low. Cy Lewin reached down, fumbling awkwardly to reach it.

He was a second too late.

As one set of clamps held and the other failed, the car twisted and buckled. With a thunder of wrenching, tearing metal, impelled by its own weight and speed, plus the heavy load inside, the car split open. Rivets sheared, paneling splintered, metal sheeting separated. On one side lower than the other because the floor was now tilted at a steep angle - a gap several feet high appeared between floor and wall. Screaming, clutching wildly at each other, the passengers slid toward it.

Cy Lewin, the elderly operator, who was nearest, was first to fall through. His single scream as he fell nine floors was cut off when his body hit the sub-basement concrete. An elderly couple from Salt Lake City fell next, clasping each other. Like Cy Lewin, they died as their bodies smashed against the ground. The Duke of Croydon fell awkwardly, striking an iron bar on the side of the shaft, which impaled him. The bar broke off, and he continued to fall. He was dead before his body reached the ground.

Somehow, others held on. While they did, the remaining two safety clamps gave way, sending the wrecked car plummeting the remaining distance down the shaft. Part way, a youngish conventioneer dentist slipped through the gap, his arms flailing. He was to survive the accident, but die three days later of internal injuries.

Herbie Chandler was more fortunate. He fell when the car was near the end of its descent. Tumbling into the adjoining shaft, he sustained head injuries from which he would recover, and sheared and fractured vertebrae which would make him a paraplegic, never walking again for the remainder of his life.

A middle-aged New Orleans woman lay, with a fractured tibia and a shattered jaw, on the elevator floor.

As the car hit bottom, Dodo was last to fall. An arm was broken and her skull cracked hard against a guide rail. She lay unconscious, close to death, as blood gushed from a massive head wound.

Three others - a Gold Crown Cola conventioneer, his wife, and Keycase Milne - were miraculously unhurt.

Beneath the wrecked elevator car, Billyboi Noble, the maintenance worker who, some ten minutes earlier, had lowered himself into the elevator pit, lay with legs and pelvis crushed, conscious, bleeding, and screaming.