Elevator Entrapment: What to Do

What should building staff do first during an entrapment?

Establish voice contact and keep it. A passenger who can hear a calm voice explaining what is happening is a passenger who will stay in the car, and staying in the car is the entire objective until qualified help arrives.

1. Speak to the passengers — through the cab phone, the intercom, or the door — and confirm how many people are inside.
2. Tell them they are safe, the car cannot fall, and help is on the way.
3. Ask whether anyone is injured, pregnant, elderly, a child alone, or in medical distress.
4. Call 911 immediately if anyone is injured or in distress.
5. Call the elevator contractor's emergency line and report the building, the car, and the floor if known.
6. Stay in contact with the passengers until help arrives — do not leave them in silence.
7. Keep other passengers away from the landing doors and post someone to direct responders.

The single most useful piece of preparation is knowing that the cab phone reaches a monitored line. Test it on a schedule, because the moment it matters is not the moment to discover it does not work.

What should nobody ever do during an entrapment?

Nobody should attempt to open the doors, move the car, or help a passenger climb out. Every serious injury in an entrapment scenario comes from an improvised rescue rather than from the stall itself — a car can move unexpectedly, and the gap between car and landing is where people get hurt.

• Do not pry, force, or unlock landing doors — that includes maintenance staff with a door key
• Do not tell passengers to climb out through a partially open door, even at floor level
• Do not open the car-top emergency exit or encourage passengers to climb up
• Do not attempt to move the car from the machine room, reset the controller, or cycle power to 'free' it
• Do not leave the passengers without a voice on the other side of the door

Removal is performed by qualified elevator personnel or the fire department. This is not a formality; it is the reason entrapments end without injuries.

Who is qualified to remove passengers from a stalled elevator?

Qualified elevator personnel and the fire department. An elevator technician can bring the car to a landing under controlled conditions and open the doors safely; the fire department is trained and equipped for the same task when it is a life-safety emergency.

Call both when anyone is injured or in distress. Call the contractor first for a routine entrapment where everyone is calm and unhurt, and call 911 if the situation changes — heat, a medical condition, or rising panic all change it.

Prime emergency dispatch

24/7, Houston metroIncluding weekends and holidays.

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Call 911

Any injury or distressDo not wait for the contractor if someone is unwell.

Passenger position

Stay in the carUntil qualified personnel or the fire department perform the removal.

What does the owner have to do after an entrapment?

If the event involved an accident, the owner must report it to the department within 24 hours — that is §754.019(e), and the window is short enough that it needs to be a standing instruction rather than a decision made later. Separately, the equipment should not go back into service until the cause is identified and addressed.

Document what happened while it is fresh: time, car, floor, number of passengers, how the car behaved, what responders did, and what the contractor found. Your contractor can help document the equipment's side, but the report to the department is the owner's duty.

Source: Tex. Health & Safety Code §754.019 — Duties of Owners

How do you reduce entrapments in the first place?

Most entrapments trace back to door equipment, control faults, or power events — the same subsystems that produce most callbacks. A maintenance program that covers doors on every visit and a control system still inside its parts-support window remove most of the causes.

• Door equipment maintained on every service visit — operator, clutch, linkage, interlocks, and detector edges
• Cab emergency phone tested on a schedule and confirmed to reach a monitored line
• Control faults investigated rather than reset — a car that parks on a fault is telling you something
• Power-event behavior understood, especially in buildings with generators or transfer switches
• Posted entrapment instructions where building staff will actually find them
• Repeat entrapments treated as a modernization signal, not a callback statistic

Prime Elevator Corp dispatches emergency service 24/7 across the Houston metro under TDLR Elevator Contractor License #20478, and will walk a building's staff through this procedure on request.