BED elevator accident highlights safety issues

Volume One, Issue 24, March 2 - March 8, 2007

Chelsea Now photos by Lindsay Beyerstein
The elevator entrance to Club BED, 530 W. 27th St., which has been closed since a fatal elevator accident on Feb. 3

By Lindsay Beyerstein

On the morning of Feb. 3, Orlando Valle, a mail-room worker from the Bronx, was visiting the posh West Chelsea club BED for the first time. Celebrating his 35th birthday with several friends and family members, he had a whole weekend of festivities planned.

His night ended in tragedy.

Around 4 a.m., a fight broke out between a 20-year-old woman in Valle’s party and the club’s coat-check attendant. When Granville Adams, a 43-year-old club host and actor from Brooklyn, and another male BED employee stepped in to break up the fight, witnesses say that Valle got drawn into the melee after the latter threw the underage woman to the floor. In the scuffle that ensued, Valle ended up slamming into the club’s elevator door, which gave way, plunging five stories down the elevator shaft to his death.

It was the first of two elevator-door accidents in the city that weekend (the other took place during a fight at the Lefrak City housing complex in Ozone Park, Queens), raising concerns among some experts who believe such deaths are easily avoidable and that more can be done to bolster the safety record of elevators throughout the city.

“You can lower the risk of this happening simply by retrofitting older elevator doors,” said Patrick Carrajef, an elevator safety consultant based in Queens, who inspected elevators in the city’s public housing projects before going into private practice.

Carrajef investigates four or five accidents of this kind every year and is currently consulting on two other cases in which New Yorkers died after knocking elevator doors off their tracks.

Inspectors from the New York City Department of Buildings’ Elevator Unit performed an emergency inspection of the BED elevator later on the morning of Feb. 3, determining that a strong impact had caused the elevator door to swing into the hoistway. They issued violations and took the elevator out of service pending a police inspection.

BED was closed the next day for “renovations” and has remained closed ever since. The club’s Website is still up and gives no indication that the club is closed at all. The pre-recorded greeting on the club’s voicemail makes no mention of a closure. Yet the club remains closed. Individual mailboxes appear to have been disabled. Messages left on the general voicemail system had not been returned as of press time.

It has not been definitively established whether poor maintenance or mechanical failure predisposed the BED elevator door to give way.

According to buildings department records, the elevator passed its most recent inspection in July 2006. However, BED was cited twice in the months between the last inspection and the accident for infractions that included failure to maintain the elevator. Neither of the violations was considered a safety hazard requiring immediate attention at the time. Since 1999, the elevator racked up 15 violations, each of which was eventually remedied.

Like many clubs in Chlesea, BED is a converted industrial space with an older elevator. According to Carrajef, older elevator doors can easily be retrofitted with Z-brackets and kickstops for safety.

“Virtually any older elevator can be retrofitted with a Z-bracket and two kickstops for $10 in parts and half-hour of labor,” Carrajef said.

The retrofit does not require any engineering modifications to the elevator itself or to the shaft, he says. The kickstops are hidden, so they don’t interfere with the aesthetics of the elevator. However, Carrajef stressed that any safety system must be properly installed and maintained in order to work, and that only a meticulous forensic investigation could determine the exact cause of an elevator accident.

New York City mandates that new elevator doors withstand at least 1,125 pounds of pressure per square foot without coming off their gliders, while some of the older doors are only engineered to withstand up to 75 pounds of pressure per square foot without derailing, according to Carrajef. While retrofitting may not make old doors as strong as new ones, they certainly help, he said. He estimated that there are 30,000–40,000 older elevators in the city that have not been retrofitted with Z-brackets or kickstops.

Carrajef noted that the combination of Z-brackets and kickstops became standard in public housing developments about 10 years ago, and said that accidents from doors giving way, which were once a chronic problem, are a distant memory.

“Since the retrofitting, I don’t recall a case in city housing where hoistway doors have been derailed. So, there’s some proof that they do work,” Carrajef said.

Karen Lindquist, acting press secretary for the Department of Buildings, confirmed that both the BED and Lefrak elevators had Z-brackets but stopped short of saying whether either was fitted with kickstops. As of press time, she had not responded to a follow-up query regarding them.

Lindquist did stress that Z-brackets are not required by law but added that the Elevator Advisory Council and the Buildings Department recommend retrofits on older elevators.

“That said, one of the best ways to prevent elevators doors from swinging into the hoistway shaft is to refrain from applying excessive force on the hoistway doors,” Lindquist said.