Someone Is Trapped in a Lift: What a Building Should Do

Entrapments are rare and almost never dangerous. What turns a twenty-minute inconvenience into a serious incident is nearly always the response: a well-meaning attempt to force the doors, or forty minutes lost because nobody knew who to ring.

The short answer: keep the passenger calm and inside the car, tell them help is coming, call your lift maintenance provider immediately, and do not attempt to open the doors or release the lift yourself. Manual release is a trained procedure, not a strong pair of hands.

The immediate steps

• Talk to the passenger. Establish contact through the doors or the intercom and stay in contact. Isolation is what frightens people, not the lift.
• Tell them to stay inside the car. A stationary lift is a safe place. The danger is at the threshold, not in the car.
• Find out who is inside. Number of people, whether anyone is unwell, elderly, pregnant, a child alone, or a wheelchair user who cannot leave unaided. This changes the priority of the response.
• Note the lift number and the floor it is between. The first question your engineer will ask.
• Call your maintenance provider. Give the building, the lift number and who is inside.
• Call Civil Defence on 997 if anyone is unwell, injured, struggling to breathe, or in distress you cannot manage.
• Keep somebody at the lift until the engineer arrives.

What nobody should attempt

• Do not force the doors open. The car is frequently not level with the floor. An open door can expose a gap into the shaft, and that is how an inconvenience becomes an injury.
• Do not help anyone climb out of a car that has stopped between floors, even if the doors are already partly open, and even if the passenger asks. Lifts have been known to move once released.
• Do not operate the manual release unless you are trained and authorised to do so. It is not a lever to try.
• Do not switch the lift off and on to reset it with someone inside.
• Do not leave the passenger alone while you go and look for a key.

What to say to the person inside

The words matter more than most people expect. Tell them the lift is safe and that it cannot fall. Tell them there is plenty of air. Give them a name — yours — and tell them you are staying where you are until they are out. Say that an engineer is on the way, and if you know roughly how long, say that too. If you do not know, say you will find out rather than guessing, because a missed estimate is worse than none.

Ask them to sit down if the wait will be long, and to avoid pressing every button.

What to have ready before it happens

Every building should be able to answer these in under a minute, at three in the morning, by whoever happens to be on duty:

• The emergency number for the lift maintenance provider, printed and by the desk — not only in one person's phone.
• The lift identification numbers, and which lift serves which core.
• Who in the building is trained and authorised to assist the engineer.
• Whether the intercom in each car actually works. Test it. It is the single most commonly broken thing on a lift and nobody notices until it matters.
• Which residents would struggle in an entrapment — a wheelchair user, someone with a heart condition, a family with young children.

Afterwards

Ask for the cause in writing. An entrapment is a symptom, and door gear, levelling faults and controller problems all announce themselves this way first. A provider who releases the passenger and leaves without explaining why it happened has done half the job.

If the same lift traps people repeatedly, that is not bad luck. It is equipment telling you something, and it is worth reading our guide on when repairing stops making sense.

Kyodo Lift answers breakdowns 24 hours a day across Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman and Abu Dhabi. Entrapments take priority over all scheduled work, and calls involving a passenger who cannot leave the car unaided are the highest priority we hold. Our number is +971 50 612 9004 — worth putting by the desk whether or not you are our client.