An elevator in Chicago’s fourth-tallest building, previously known as the John Hancock Center, plunged 84 floors on Nov. 16, leading the passengers to believe they were about to die before the fall stopped.
The elevator departed from the 95th floor of the building at 875 North Michigan Avenue, with passengers entering from the Signature Room restaurant, and plunged to the 11th floor, after one of several cables holding it broke.
“I believed we were going to die,” Jaime Montemayor, a tourist from Mexico and one of six people inside, told CBS. “We were going down and then I felt that we were falling down and then I heard a noise–clack clack clack clack clack clack.”
A Northwestern University law student who declined to share her name said that she and another law student had gone to the restaurant for the first time but were turned away because it had just closed. They reboarded the elevator and survived the plunge.
“It was really bumpy—it felt like a flight into Chicago,” she told the Chicago Tribune.
Some passengers were calm at first but slowly began worrying as the time dragged on, the other law student said.
BREAKING: 6 people just rescued from elevator on 92nd fl of Hancock Building after being trapped for about 3 hours! ???? Chicago FD! pic.twitter.com/lmPL6KNB5t
— Nancy Loo (@NancyLoo) November 16, 2018
Rescue
The rescue took nearly three hours because of the building’s design.
Passengers spoke with the Chicago Fire Department through the ordeal and at one point began praying.
The rescue crew eventually hammered out a concrete wall in the garage area of the 11th floor and made it through to the passengers. They had first used a tiny camera inserted through a hole they drilled to confirm it was the right area, Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford told the Tribune.
“Once they did that, they knew which walls to break,” he said.
“It was a precarious situation where we had the cable break on top of the elevator [and] we couldn’t do an elevator-to-elevator rescue we had to breach a wall,” Chicago Battalion Fire Chief Patrick Maloney told CBS.
‘The Craziest Thing’
Luis Vazquez, a Mexico City resident and civil engineer who had been dining with Montemayor and boarded a different elevator, couldn’t believe what happened.
“This is the second-most important building in Chicago? And this is the third-most important city in the United States?” he told CBS. “In the 98 floors, they have no place to open any door? That is the craziest thing.”
The rescue was completed shortly after 3 a.m., with a crowd assembled outside the elevator banks clapping loudly and applauding as the rescue crews walked through.
“It felt great to get out and tell everyone we were safe,” one of the law students said. “We could go to sleep.”