Man In Falling Elevator Says He Thought It Wouldn’t Stop

The recently modernized Rhodes Tower in Columbus, Ohio, was completed and occupied in 1974; photo by Tysto for Wikipedia.

A man who was riding an elevator inside a government office tower in Columbus, Ohio, when a cable broke and it started falling down the shaft says the incident was scary and he “thought that it might not stop,” 10 WBNS reported last week. Brett Kravitz, an assistant principal attorney general, had stepped onto the elevator inside the Rhodes Tower on February 1 when he heard a cable snap and felt the elevator descend. The lift, under the control of the emergency brakes, stopped after falling five or six floors, Kravitz said, with officials saying it was halted on the building’s 12th floor. An investigation made it clear that the elevator was found to be operating incorrectly during an inspection in May 2021: “not showing the correct floor.” A spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Commerce said its Division of Industrial Compliance, which inspects elevators, said they had no record of the required re-inspection before the elevator resumed operating — meaning the elevator Kravitz was riding in and on which the cable snapped should not have been operating. Kravitz said the incident left him unharmed but shaken by the fall. The current status of the elevator situation was not immediately addressed.

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