The day a 30-year-old cable snapped and took out a hospital elevator

I was working on an Otis lift at Mercy Hospital in Detroit around 2018 when a main hoist cable let go while I was testing it under load. Had to manually lock the brakes and call in a crane to pull the car back up, took me and two other guys 6 hours to replace. Has anyone else dealt with sudden cable failure on an older machine?

2 comments

2 Comments

finleyl551mo ago

Did you guys have to make any adjustments to the brake timing after the cable snapped... I've heard it can mess with the way the system engages under a sudden load. We had a similar thing on an old traction machine in Chicago, and the brakes were grabbing way too hard for weeks after. That crane job sounds like a real headache, but at least you got the car back up without having to cut the cables down.

ellis.rose1mo ago

The brake grabbing issue after a snap is real, but nobody talks about the counterweight side of things. When that cable let go, the counterweight probably dropped like a rock too, and if it bottomed out hard enough it can crack the buffer mounts under the pit. We had to weld a new bracket on ours after a similar scare, so check those buffers before you trust the brake timing fix.