Posted on 02/09/2010 8:52:26 PM PST by bruinbirdman
Terrified passengers were left stranded between floors in the world’s tallest building after a lift broke as they were descending in the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai.
Visitors queueing to descend from the observation deck on the 124th floor of the recently opened 828-metre (2,717ft) tower heard a crash and the sound of breaking glass from the lift shaft. Dust then billowed back into the room through the small gaps in the lift shaft doors.
The 15 passengers inside the lift were left stranded for 45 minutes before they were rescued by staff who dropped a ladder into the shaft and helped them to climb out to the observation deck. About 60 tourists who had heard the incident were left on the deck without explanation as security guards said that nothing was wrong. They were eventually joined by hysterical and dazed passengers from a second lift, who had been descending the tower when the incident occurred in the adjacent shaft. Their lift also stopped but was later safely returned to the observation deck, which was eventually evacuated via a service lift.
One visitor said that the initial lift failure sounded like “a small explosion”. It is still not clear whether anyone was injured. The Burj, which opened on January 4 with an extravagant firework display, was closed on Sunday after the incident.
Public access to the observation deck has been halted indefinitely, leaving hundreds of disgruntled tourists queueing for refunds for what should have been a highlight of their visit to the Gulf state. Emaar, the building’s developer, declined to comment on the incident but initially blamed its closure on “unexpectedly high traffic” in the tower. It later added that unspecified electrical problems could be to blame.
The lifts were promoted as one of the highlights of
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Couldn’t pay me good money to go up in that thing.
Funny how, from that view, The Burg Dubai looks just like sketches of The Tower of Babel.
No matter how tall the building, being stuck in an elevator shaft can be absolutely terrifying! It happened to me in the late 1990’s and I became severely claustrophobic from it. Packed like sardines with winter gear on and the air stops circulating! The only way out...break out the wall and climb over into another elevator. But that’s not nearly as bad...as I remember around the same time it happened to me.... a bunch of people and small school children were stuck in a large capacity elevator in NY, Empire State Building I think.... for quite some time and the lights went out...they were stuck in pitch darkness!
yitbos
Was the glass crash the entrance to the stuck cab by rescuers, or how the cab stuck in the first place? Nothing wrong my fatwa!
Doesn’t really seem too different from the unpleasant surprize many of the immigrant laborers who built that thing, learned once they got to Dubai.
Just saying.
Moral: Stay away form Arab shafts.
I don’t know about that elevator, but it’s obvious now that the art of photographing buildings is lost forever. Rule #0 sayeth: you shall not tilt yer camera, lest you want other buildings to look “falling.”
That’s what she said lol
“Visitors queueing to descend from the observation deck on the 124th floor of the recently opened 828-metre (2,717ft) tower heard a crash and the sound of breaking glass from the lift shaft.”
Can ya dig it?
I thought the weight of that building was pushing the ground down and causing the other buildings to lean toward it. ;0)
You would have had to pick me up with a spoon if that happened to me———but I wouldn’t go on it in the first place.
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