Six people, including a pregnant woman, have been rescued from a lift which plummeted 84 floors after two suspension cables snapped.
Diners leaving the Signature Room restaurant on the 95th floor of Chicago’s 100-storey 875 North Michigan Avenue skyscraper spent two and a half hours trapped in the crashed lift after the terrifying fall, which occurred shortly after midnight on Friday.
Jaime Montemayor, a tourist from Mexico, spoke of moment the lift carriage suddenly dropped more than 200 metres.
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“We were going down, and then I felt that we were falling down and then I heard a noise - clack, clack, clack,” he told CBS. “I believed we were going to die.”
The carriage finally came to a halt between floors near the 11th storey. Remarkably, none of the passengers was physically harmed by the fall.
Because the lift was an express service, intended to travel many floors at once, the shaft does not include openings on every floor, ABC reports. This meant emergency services were forced to break through the concrete wall of the 11th-floor car park order to reach the trapped passengers.
“It was a pretty precarious situation where the cables that were broke were on top of the elevator,” Chicago Battalion Fire Chief Patrick Maloney told the press.
The rescue operation took almost three hours, but Maloney said the passengers were “very gracious” and grateful to the specialist firefighters who carried out the delicate operation.
The malfunctioning lift and two others in the skyscraper, formerly known as the John Hancock Center, “have since been closed to the public while repairs are made and investigators figure out what happened”, CBS reports. Early assessments suggest a “faulty hoist rope” was responsible for the fall.
