Sabrina Kasper is claustrophobic.

Not a huge fan of elevators in general, the Pitt freshman… Sabrina Kasper is claustrophobic.

Not a huge fan of elevators in general, the Pitt freshman tries to take the stairs when possible, particularly after one October day last semester.

Kasper said a Litchfield Tower A elevator shook a little after someone pressed the lobby button. The doors wouldn’t open, she said, leading one of the other 11 people in the elevator to pry the doors open.

“All we could see was a wall with a space maybe 8 inches at the bottom that we could see the garage through,” she said. “It was so hot, because of all the body heat, that the walls had condensation on them.”

According to Kasper, the group pushed the call button and “screamed out the little hole” until someone answered them.

Pitt police arrived in the basement and assured the group they would be let out, but Kasper said that after 15 minutes, they were still trapped in the elevator.

“The officer came back and said the key didn’t work, so they had to call the company that made the elevator,” she said.

More time passed, and Kasper said the officer kept checking in on them, letting the group know the workers were running late. After another 15 minutes, she said, they were lowered to the ground manually.

Elevator entrapments are not rare on Pitt’s campus. They usually occur several times a week in various elevators across campus. As a result, Pitt Police Chief Tim Delaney said, the University has a policy concerning elevator entrapments.

“We will not remove anyone trapped in an elevator,” Delaney said. “Most [elevator] accidents happen when people attempt to leave on their own or when people are not trained to rescue them. Neither the police department nor engineering will physically open the door and take people out.”

Delaney’s point about people attempting escape on their own has proven true in recent years at other colleges and universities. According to The Daily Collegian, Pennsylvania State University’s student newspaper, Penn State student Katherine Ibanez died in December 2003 after attempting to jump from a broken-down elevator to the next floor.

According to Delaney and University spokesperson John Fedele, Pitt follows a procedure once an entrapment is reported. Pitt Police are notified first and, once they have determined the location of the entrapment, the officers contact the elevator company, Delaney said. According to Fedele, the officers will then call either facilities management or the housing department, depending on where the elevator is located. He added that the building engineer will come by to try to help police, if necessary.

“The company will call back with an estimated time of arrival,” Fedele said. “Sometimes, though, the elevator will just settle to the next floor.”

“It’s all mechanical,” Delaney said. “It’s not a surprise when this happens.”

He added that the causes of the entrapments vary, ranging from an electronic glitch to airflow. To Delaney’s knowledge, no one has been injured in an elevator accident at Pitt.

Despite no history of injuries, elevator entrapments still prove to be an annoyance to those stuck in them.

Entrapment isn’t the only problem, either: Some students say campus elevators make them nervous and that they find them unreliable.

Freshman Allison Milwid was stuck in a Thaw Hall elevator on her way back to the dorms one day last semester. She said she and her friends got into the elevator and pressed the button to go to the lobby. When the elevator arrived, its doors only opened two inches. The group sat and waited, and eventually hit the button to go to the next level, where the doors functioned properly.

Meanwhile, Kasper isn’t as nervous about the elevators anymore. She said she took the stairs for the first week, but now is back to safe elevator riding.

“But I’m still pretty leery of the elevators,” she added.