Who is responsible when someone is trapped in a lift?

Someone is trapped in the lift at eleven on a Sunday night. Who is actually obliged to attend, how quickly, and who wears it if nobody does? The answer is usually less settled than owners assume.

The duty sits with the building, not the contractor

Lifts are plant. Under work health and safety law the person with management or control of plant at a workplace carries duties for its safe operation, inspection and maintenance. For an apartment building that is generally the owners corporation or body corporate, exercised through the committee and whoever they engage to manage it.

Engaging a maintenance contractor does not transfer that duty. It discharges part of it, to the extent of what the contract actually says. The gap between what owners assume the contract covers and what it says is where most of the difficulty lives.

What the maintenance agreement usually does and does not say

Read your agreement looking for four specific things:

• Is entrapment response separated from ordinary breakdown response? They are different obligations and a single blended response time usually means neither is committed to properly.
• Is the response time expressed in hours, and does it apply outside business hours? A commitment that applies nine to five on weekdays is not a commitment for Sunday night.
• Is there a consequence attached? A stated response time with no remedy behind it is an intention, not an obligation.
• Who is the release performed by? Some agreements assume the building has someone trained on site. If your building does not, that assumption needs correcting before it is tested.

The emergency communication is part of the arrangement

A release obligation is worthless if nobody knows a person is trapped. The communication unit in the car must reach someone who answers, at any hour, and that person must know what to do with the call. Test it. Ring it from inside the car and time how long it takes for a human to speak, then ask them what happens next. This takes ten minutes and reveals more than a year of service reports.

Where committees get caught out

Three patterns recur. The first is a caretaker or building manager who has been performing releases informally, without training, for years, because it is quicker than waiting. That is a serious exposure for the individual and for the owners corporation.

The second is a maintenance agreement inherited at handover from the developer, never read by the committee that is now bound by it.

The third is entrapments being recorded as service calls, so nobody notices the building has had six in a year. A pattern of entrapments is a fault with a cause, and it will keep producing entrapments until someone treats it as one.

What a committee should be able to produce

• The maintenance agreement, with the entrapment response obligation identified.
• A written release procedure naming who performs it and how they are contacted after hours.
• Evidence that the emergency communication in each car is tested and reaches a monitored service.
• A log of every entrapment with the cause identified.

If any of those four is missing, that is worth fixing at the next committee meeting rather than after the next incident. If you want an independent read of what your agreement actually commits your contractor to, that is a normal piece of work and we are happy to look at it.