accidentswillhappenoccasionally

BP Collected 6,077 Barrels Friday at Well

2010-06-05T16:56:00.000-07:00

By STEPHEN WISNEFSKI
[0605oilA] Associated Press

A man walks past oil residue on the beach in Gulf Shores, Ala. Oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill has started washing ashore on the Alabama and Florida coast beaches.

BP PLC collected 6,077 barrels of oil on Friday, the first full day after a new containment cap was placed over the deepwater well in the Gulf of Mexico that has been leaking for more than six weeks, the company said early Saturday on its website, noting that the rate should increase in the coming days.

The first daily estimate of oil collected indicates that possibly between half and one-third of the oil that is spewing from the BP-owned Macondo well is being captured. Last week, scientists led by the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels a day were gushing into the Gulf, though some scientists have said the rate is likely considerably higher and the government team continues to evaluate the flow.

With a cap lowered over a runaway well, BP is beginning to capture some of the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, but residents are worried about oil hitting beaches. Video courtesy of Fox News.

"Optimization continues and improvement in oil collection is expected over the next several days," BP said in the update, noting that it had also collected 15.7 million standard cubic feet of natural gas that was flared.at the surface.

On Saturday, at the spill site, a flotilla of at least 10 vessels clustered around the Discoverer Enterprise, the 835 foot-long drillship that is collecting oil siphoned from the well through a newly insinslled riser. Next to the drillship, a giant flame could be seen from a U.S. Coast Guard airplane—millions of cubic feet of natural gas being flared. Swaths of brown oil surrounded the fleet.

U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who is overseeing the federal response to the oil spill, said at a news conference in Theodore, Ala., that technicians are working to increase the production rate but are doing so in a manner that won't allow for the introduction of hydrates into the containment cap. Hydrates, which are ice-like crystals that form when frigid seawater combines with natural-gas molecules, derailed a separate containment effort that BP attempted last month.

The containment device that is now in place has four vents to help prevent hydrate buildup, though these also allow oil and natural gas to escape. Technicians had hoped to close the vents on Friday to boost the capture rate, but Adm. Allen said they remained open as of Saturday morning.

"They're going to remain open until they can stabilize the pressure and the rate of production," Adm. Allen said at Saturday's briefing. "They're making adjustments to the system and making sure they don't increase the production rate until it's safe to do so."

He said the goal is to take as much pressure coming from the well as possible and put it into production, but that it's essential to stabilize the pressure.

Chocolate-brown tar balls were washing ashore Pensacola Beach in Florida. Video courtesy of Fox News.

"Once you've optimized that pressure, there's a ... smaller chance that whatever oil that cannot be accommodated up to that pipe for production will go down and out those rubber seals [on the cap]," he said. "That will be the final, what I would call residual, leakage we're going to have to manage over the long term."

Adm. Allen said that any oil that continues to leak at the source would be treated with subsea chemical dispersants. He added that officials are doing all they can to limit the use of dispersants at the surface, as much more has been used than could have been originally envisioned. Scientists have raised serious concerns about the potential long-term effects that dispersants could have on marine life.

BP placed the containment cap over the leaking well late Thursday after severing the pipe that lies a mile beneath the water's surface. The company wasn't able to get as smooth of a cut as it had originally hoped for, which means that it hasn't been able to get as tight a seal as needed to keep oil from leaking.

The Macondo well has been spewing hundreds of thousands of gallons a day of oil since the explosion on April 20 and sinking two days later of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig owned by Transocean Ltd. The disaster is threatening to cause devastating ecolological and economic harm to a wide area of the U.S. Gulf Coast.

BP and the U.S. government have come under withering criticism as repeated attempts to stop or contain the oil spill, which is now among the biggest in history, have failed. BP, which has seen its share price fall nearly 40% since the rig exploded, has already spent more than $1 billion on its response efforts and faces a raft of litigation, as well as a federal criminal probe into the incident. The Obama administration has said it will hold BP and other responsible parties accountable and has also taken steps to restrict offshore drilling.

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Associated Press

This computer image released shows that oil leaking from a damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico could wind up on the East Coast and even get carried on currents across the Atlantic Ocean.

BP has stumbled frequently in its efforts to contain the spill. Last weekend it suspended a much-vaunted procedure known as "top kill," which was designed to plug the well. As the company proceeds with its containment efforts, it is also drilling two relief wells that are seen as the ultimate solution to stopping the leak but won't be ready until August.

"The long-term threat of this well will not go away until the relief well has been drilled, pressure has been taken off and the well has been plugged," Adm. Allen said Saturday. "In the meantime, we have to optimize our containment efforts."

He said the worst-case scenario now is that the oil discharge related to what can't be contained continues until the relief wells are drilled in early August.

Questions remain about how much oil is flowing from the well, especially since government officials over the past week said that the latest containment effort could increase the rate by about 20%, at least temporarily.

Adm. Allen said that the government's flow-rate technical group continues to study the matter, and that production numbers from the Macondo well in coming days will help add clarity.

"Hopefully we'll start moving those ranges into a more acceptable representation of what's actually flowing, and the best way to do that is to get a good flow rate of production because once you know what you are producing every day, that's a known quantity you can take off the table," he said.

Meantime, he noted that winds continued pushing the northern edge of the spill closer to Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and oil is increasingly washing up on shores.

Tar balls have started washing up on the Florida Panhandle in recent days, threatening the area's reputation for clean beaches and emerald-tinted waters. Even as a sign welcomed tourists to Pensacola Beach with the boast "World's Whitest Beaches," cleanup teams have been deployed to scour 18 miles of shoreline in Escambia County.

Tar Reaches the Florida Coast

Escambia County officials in Florida said Saturday that the primary oil plume is two miles from Pensacola Beach, and that a light sheen, three miles wide, is slightly more than a half mile from the same beach.

In his weekly radio address Saturday, President Barack Obama, who on Friday made his third visit to the Gulf Coast since the crisis began, asked Americans to support the Gulf Coast by visiting the area's beaches, many of which remain unaffected.

"We will continue to leverage every resource at our disposal to protect coastlines, to clean up the oil, to hold BP and other companies accountable for damages, to begin to restore the bounty and beauty of this region—and to aid the hardworking people of the Gulf as they rebuild their businesses and communities," he said.

Worst Fire Safety Demo Ever

2010-06-02T09:58:00.001-07:00

If You Think You Have a Sense of the Oil Spill's Scale

2010-05-20T14:19:00.001-07:00

Disaster Plans Lacking at Deep Rigs

2010-05-17T20:21:00.000-07:00

By BEN CASSELMAN And GUY CHAZAN

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig burns in the Gulf of Mexico on April 21.

A huge jolt convulsed an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The pipe down to the well on the ocean floor, more than a mile below, snapped in two. Workers battled a toxic spill.

That was 2003—seven years before last month's Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 people and sent crude spewing into the sea. And in 2004, managers of BP PLC, the oil giant involved in both incidents, warned in a trade journal that the company wasn't prepared for the long-term, round-the-clock task of dealing with a deep-sea spill.

It still isn't, as Deepwater Horizon demonstrates and as BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward said recently. It's "probably true" that BP didn't do enough planning in advance of the disaster, Mr. Hayward said. There are some capabilities, he said, "that we could have available to deploy instantly, rather than creating as we go."

It's a problem that spans the industry, whose major players include Chevron Corp, Royal Dutch Shell and Petróleo Brasileiro SA. Without adequately planning for trouble, the oil business has focused on developing experimental equipment and techniques to drill in ever deeper waters, according to a Wall Street Journal examination of previous deepwater accidents. As drillers pushed the boundaries, regulators didn't always mandate preparation for disaster recovery or perform independent monitoring.
More on the Spill

See graphics covering how the spill happened, what's being done to stop it, and the impact on the region.

The brief, roughly two-decade history of deepwater drilling has seen serious problems: fires, equipment failures, wells that collapsed, platforms that nearly sank. Since last July, one brand-new deepwater rig—among the 40 or so operating in at least 1,000 feet of water in the Gulf—was swept by fire. Another lost power and started to drift, threatening to detach from the wellhead. Poor maintenance at a third deepwater well led to a serious gas leak, according to regulatory records.

By some measures, offshore drilling has become safer in recent years. Industry backers argue that major accidents are rare. The rate of serious injuries in U.S. waters fell 71% between 1998 and 2008, and the number of serious oil spills has also been falling once hurricanes are taken into account. Moreover, deepwater drilling is by some measures safer than drilling in shallower waters, where rigs are often older and operated by smaller companies.

Still, drilling for oil at depths no human could survive presents special risks when something does go wrong. The water pressure is crushing, the seabed temperature is almost freezing, the underground conditions explosive. The rapid push into deeper water means that some projects rely on technology that hasn't been used before.

"It's like outer space, in terms of the complexity of the operating environment," said Robin West, who helped oversee offshore-drilling policy under President Ronald Reagan and is now chairman of PFC Energy, a consulting firm.

In 2008, Chevron was plagued with accidents while using the Discoverer Deep Seas rig in more than 7,000 feet of water in the Gulf. There was a fire, then a leak deep under the sea. Finally the cement and steel casing inside the well collapsed, allowing drilling fluid to flow out of control. Workers stopped the flow only by permanently plugging the well.

Chevron says the well was "safely and permanently" abandoned after the problems. "One of Chevron's core values is the safety of our employees, contractors and neighbors," Chevron spokesman Kurt Glaubitz said. "It is fundamental to how we operate."

BP has led the charge into the deepest, most challenging environments. Last week Mr. Hayward, the CEO, said, "It's clear that we will find things we can do differently."

As companies have moved farther offshore, drilling has gotten increasingly expensive. BP was paying nearly $500,000 a day to lease the Deepwater Horizon from Transocean Ltd. and paid roughly that much again for other equipment and services.

BP's oil platform Thunder Horse listed off the Louisiana coast in 2005 after a faulty control system allowed water to flood the platform.

One of the most serious safety hazards on rigs are "blowouts," the uncontrolled flows of oil and natural gas like the one that brought down the Deepwater Horizon. They remain relatively rare, but no more so than in the 1960s, when equipment was much more primitive.

That's in part because, even as the gear used to fight blowouts has improved, the industry has steadily pushed into deeper waters.

"While drilling as a whole may be advancing to keep up with these environments, some parts lag behind," Texas A&M professors Samuel Noynaert and Jerome Schubert wrote in a 2005 paper published in an industry journal. "An area that has seen this stagnation and resulting call for change has been blowout control in deep and ultra-deep waters."

The professors declined to comment for this article.

Serious accidents like the Deepwater Horizon have been rare, but not unheard of. In 2001, an oil-and-gas-production platform off Brazil's coast exploded and ultimately sank, killing 11 people.

Offshore drilling is almost as old as the oil industry itself. In the 1890s, companies began prospecting for oil from piers extending off the beach near Santa Barbara, Calif. In 1947, Kerr McGee Corp. (which was later acquired by Anandarko Petroleum Corp.) drilled the first well out of sight of land, in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the past decade or so, what had been a steady march into deeper water turned into a sprint, as easier-to-find oil fields dwindled. In 1996, Royal Dutch Shell broke new ground with its Mars platform, which floated in 3,000 feet of water. A decade later, wells in 5,000 feet of water—almost a mile deep—were so common as to be considered relatively routine. Several rigs working today can drill in water as much as 12,000 feet deep, more than two miles above the ocean floor.

Shell says it has operated in the Gulf for five decades without "a significant offshore well incident or platform spill in the deep water Gulf of Mexico."

Drilling in deeper water doesn't change the fundamental process, but it makes virtually everything harder. Rigs must be bigger so they can hold more drilling pipe to stretch vast distances. The pipes themselves must be stronger to withstand ocean currents. Equipment on the sea floor must be sturdier to face extreme pressures at depth.

Drill bits must be tougher so they don't melt in the 400-degree temperatures they encounter deep in the earth. And it is harder for drillers to exert just the right amount of pressure down the well bore, enough to keep oil and gas from spurting upwards—a blowout—but not so much that they crack open the rocks beneath the surface, which could also lead to a blowout.

The use of untested techniques has raised alarm bells among some engineers. In a paper published in a trade journal last year, three industry engineers in Denmark noted that many deepwater projects are "dependent on prototype and novel technologies." They said, "there is significant uncertainty related to the performance of these systems," because they haven't been tested in real-world settings.

They couldn't be reached for comment.

BP discovered that in 1999 at its Thunder Horse offshore oil field in the Gulf of Mexico, where managers say hundreds of pieces of equipment had to be created from scratch.

Not all the brand-new systems worked. Thunder Horse had a near disaster in 2005, when a faulty control system opened valves and allowed water to flood into the hull of a drilling platform there. The multibillion-dollar platform almost sank. BP spent months fixing equipment damaged in the flood.

And in 2006, as Thunder Horse was getting close to completion, workers discovered a leak in one of the huge sets of valves on the seafloor that control the flow of oil and gas from the wells. An investigation found minute cracks in a protective coating on some of the pipes, allowing corrosion that could, ultimately, have led to breakage of the pipes. BP had to pull the equipment back to the surface for repairs, delaying the project for months and raising the costs.

Equipment failure was also to blame in the case of the Discoverer Enterprise, the rig that ran into trouble in 2003 when the "riser," the pipe down to the seafloor, snapped in two. That left the Enterprise floating free, with no immediate way to control the well sitting on the sea floor more than a mile below. That well, investigators later concluded, had the potential to spew more oil in one week than was spilled in 1989 by the Exxon Valdez, which ranks as one of the worst U.S. oil spills to date.

In a 2004 article in a trade journal, two BP managers evaluated the company's response to the Discoverer Enterprise incident. Their conclusion: Although the company's initial reaction was strong, it had "less focus" on the longer term and wasn't prepared for the nearly two weeks of round-the-clock response even the fairly small spill required.

A BP spokesman said it follows a "tried-and-tested approach to incident management."

Catastrophe was averted in the Discoverer Enterprise case because, unlike at the Deepwater Horizon, the well's "dead-man switch" was triggered when the riser broke. A powerful contraption known as a blowout preventer sheared off the pipe and sealed off the well. Some 2,450 barrels of drilling fluid inside the riser spilled into the Gulf, but the well itself was secure.

Today, the Discoverer Enterprise is located at the site where the Deepwater Horizon sank, sucking up oil from the still-leaking well through a special tube.

Drilling companies have pushed the limits of technology in blowout preventers, also known as BOPs. Multiple technical papers have called into question whether the shears are powerful enough to cut through the tough steel used in modern drilling pipe at the deepest wells. A 2004 study commissioned by federal regulators found that only three of 14 newly built rigs had shears powerful enough to cut through pipe at the equipment's maximum water depth.

"This grim snapshot illustrates the lack of preparedness in the industry to shear and seal a well with the last line of defense against a blowout," the study said.

Andy Radford, a policy adviser for the American Petroleum Institute, said the group recommends that all blowout preventers be equipped with shears powerful enough to cut through the pipe being used.

Some subsequent studies, including a 2007 paper co-authored by a BP engineer, have echoed those concerns. "The use of higher strength, higher toughness drill pipe ... has in some cases exceeded the capacity of some BOP shear rams to successfully and or reliably shear drill pipe," the 2007 paper said.
[DEEPWATER_jmp]

When things go wrong in deep water, the problems are harder to solve. "If we can touch the wellhead, we have a really super high chance of making the flow stop," said Daniel Eby, vice president of Cudd Well Control, a contractor that helps oil companies stop out-of-control wells. "The problem comes when you can't touch it. And when you put that wellhead in 5,000 feet of water, we can't touch it."

The current crisis is widely expected to send insurance costs higher for deepwater drilling. Lloyd & Partners Ltd., a London broker, recently said it would cut back the amount of pollution insurance it offers to oil companies by a third. In general, rates have risen for all drilling rigs in recent years due to hurricane damage and other issues, but haven't been consistently higher for deepwater rigs than for those in shallower water.

Government regulators have long known that the deepwater presents special challenges. After the 2003 accident on the Discoverer Enterprise, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration conducted a study looking at how to tell where oil from an undersea spill would reach the surface, and how to better coordinate with workers responding to a spill.

The Minerals Management Service, the government agency that oversees offshore drilling, in recent years moved away from requiring specific safety measures in offshore drilling and instead set broad performance goals that it was up to the industry to meet.

MMS declined to make an official available for an interview for this article. In a statement, the agency said it's reviewing its oversight in light of the disaster.

In joint MMS-Coast Guard hearings into the Deepwater Horizon accident, Michael Saucier, an MMS official, testified that the agency "highly encouraged," but didn't require, companies to have back-up systems to trigger blowout preventers in case of an emergency.

"Highly encourage? How does that translate to enforcement?" Coast Guard Capt. Hung Nguyen, who is co-chairing the investigation, asked at the hearings.

"There is no enforcement," Mr. Saucier replied.

Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Michael Odom, who oversees Coast Guard inspections (the Coast Guard inspects oil-company vessels above the water, while the MMS oversees drilling) testified that current regulations for offshore drilling may be out-of-date. He said many regulations were written years ago, and focused on near-shore drilling operations.

"The pace of technology has definitely outrun the regulations," Mr. Odom said at the hearing.

Cable Roll Accident

2009-11-17T04:21:00.001-08:00

This is how not to push a cable roll upstairs. It misses the guy by the door by a few feet and crashes into a parked corvette.

Fork-lift driver loses control

2009-11-17T04:16:00.000-08:00

Amazing pictures of the moment a Russian fork-lift driver loses control bringing the contents of an entire warehouse smashing down.

Amazing Video Shot From A Skier’s Helmet Cam of an Avalanche Burial & Rescue

2009-10-06T06:11:00.000-07:00

Avalanche Skier POV Helmet Cam Burial & Rescue in Haines, Alaska from Chappy on Vimeo.

In April of 2008 I drove from Lake Tahoe to Haines, Alaska up the Al-Can highway through British Columbia and the Yukon with an enclosed 4-snowmobile trailer and a ton of gear. I told myself the year before after a few years of getting "shut out" with heli time, that I wouldn't come back up without snowmobiles....instead of sitting around drinking myself into oblivion on a "down day."

Well thank God we did that because we definitely had down days again right from the get-go. The sledding up at Haines Pass is out of control good. Even staying closer to town like below Old Faithful is great. Can't say enough about how much fun it is to ride snowmobiles up there with no trees.

So the first legit day after that main snow storm cycle, we still went out snowmobiling one more time wanting to let the snow set up a bit more....while another part of our group went up in the bird. Actually two groups went up in the bird, and the first group did all the normal day-after-storm-cycle snow pit and snow quality tests.

The first group decided that while the dangers remained elevated, that it was good to go. They all made some of the sickest pow turns in their lives I was told. The next group then - a couple hundred meters or so over - set up for their descent.

The guy in the video was the first one to drop from their group and while not a guide, he had a lot of Utah and AK backcountry experience. He had a Black Diamond Avalung on, but as you can tell from the video while he's talking as he's dropping in, it wasn't in his mouth to start. He tried to shove it in the instant of starting to get sucked down, but it didn't stay in fully during his ragdoll descent. It was just off to the corner of his mouth he said, and he definitely got some snow / ice in his mouth still.

So as he drops in you can also see the sluff to the skier's right immediately start building....and that's actually the chute that was the intended route down. For whatever reason - well pure, unadulterated powder will do it to you - he didn't go make some strong "skier cuts" into the upper pack to do one final snow check as instructed by the main guide who was doing the "tail gunner" work.

Instead he just sent it. And it didn't take more than a few turns out on this big shoulder above this cliff band to break loose.

This was a decent sized avalanche. 1,500 feet the dude fell in a little over 20 seconds. The crown was about 1 - 1.5m. The chute that he got sucked through to the skier's right was flanked on either side by cliff bands that were about 30m tall. He luckily didn't break any bones and obviously didn't hit anything on the run out.

He was only buried for 4 and a half minutes which is incredibly short. I cannot stress these next sentences enough; that in and of itself to be unburied in ONLY 4:28 is miraculous if you have any understanding of being caught in an avalanche and what it takes to be found. It could literally be some kind of "world record" just on how good the guide and supporting cast of other skiers was in getting to him. It also shows why you should ALWAYS be going with people trained in avalanche rescue / first aid....as well as why you'd want to be going with a guided heli operation. Sure this was terrifying for him, but he would've probably been dead if not for going with a guide.

He also got very lucky to be honest. In the time that he's buried, you can hear his breathing already accelerate. The ruffling noise back and forth is his chest rising and falling and the noise that his jacket makes. The intermittent whimpering noise you hear is him trying to swallow and get some air since the avalung wasn't fully in his mouth and instead just to the corner of his mouth. Still sends chills up the back of my neck. Oh...the luck? They located him so fast because his right glove came off just before he came completley to rest and there was an excellent visual of course.

And then the digging out is utterly amazing. I don't think that you could've paid a Hollywood crew to stage something better. The fact that he could've been facing any 360 direction and yet he's looking right up into the sun-filled blue sky with that first full scoop away of the shovel is borderline spiritual.

This is simply a very sobering and unbelievable video. However, you should take away from this video all the positive things that you can learn from it. Yes there are risks to the backcountry - but with proper gear, training, and guide(s) with avalanche and EMT training - you can greatly lower your chances of getting caught in an avalanche in the first place.....and coming back alive if you ever were to get caught in a slide.

Respect Mother Nature for sure. Learn from this. But just like a Craig Kelly in the snowboard world or a Shane McConkey in the ski world who died out in the backcountry (Craig via avalanche and Shane via ski B.A.S.E. jumping), they left this earth while doing the things that they were truly passionate about. And while they would stress the need for the proper gear and training....neither one would want backcountry enthusiasts to curtail their adventures because of their accidents....or this video.

A model trips

2009-09-04T05:53:00.000-07:00

Parasailing for Dummies

2009-08-22T05:14:00.000-07:00

A Compilation of Parasailing and Parachuting Gone Wrong

kid smashing a WD40 can

2009-07-26T09:11:00.000-07:00

Was it luck or skill

2009-06-11T06:27:00.000-07:00

Hero Pilot 'Sully' Stars at Safety Hearing

2009-06-10T16:52:00.000-07:00

Transcript Reveals Details From Hudson Splashdown

By ANDY PASZTOR

WASHINGTON -- US Airways Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the much-heralded hero of the January airliner ditching on New York's Hudson River, told federal investigators Tuesday that in a matter of seconds he determined only the river was "long enough, wide enough and smooth enough" to put down his crippled jetliner.
video
Audio From US Airways Crash in Hudson River
4:42

The National Transportation Safety Board is holding a hearing into the January crash of US Airways Flight 1549 into a New York river. The NTSB has released audio of the pilots and air-traffic controllers. Animation courtesy of the NTSB.

Testifying before the National Transportation Safety Board, Capt. Sullenberger said that when both engines of his Airbus A320 lost power at about 2,700 feet after sucking in birds, he quickly decided that the plane was losing speed and altitude and that returning to LaGuardia airport was "problematic."

"I had to make sure I could make it [back to LaGuardia] before I chose that option," Capt. Sullenberger said. "I couldn't afford to be wrong." (See and hear the transcript from Flight 1549.)

In many ways, the scene in the packed hearing room resembled an interview of a pop idol more than the testimony of an aviator who started flying as a teenager and has worked for US Airways for nearly three decades. The questioning was gentle, respectful and at times, downright congenial.

View Full Image
US Airways Flight 1549
Associated Press

US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River on January 15.
US Airways Flight 1549
US Airways Flight 1549
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* NTSB Animation: Flight path video, transcript
* Pilot Lands Jet on Hudson River
01/16/09
* Photos of the river landing
* Map | Audio Reports

In the highly unusual hearing, Capt. Sullenberger's unemotional, sometimes clipped testimony was watched by a throng of international media.

While the first part of the hearing produced little new technical information, it did highlight the intense drama, adrenaline and teamwork that saved the lives of all 155 people aboard Flight 1549 on Jan. 15.

After spotting a flock of birds that "were very large and filled the entire windscreen" of the jet, Capt Sullenberger noticed a dramatic drop in thrust. Investigators later determined at least three birds were sucked into the engines. Disregarding air-traffic controller suggestions to return to LaGuardia or try to swoop into another nearby airport, Capt. Sullenberger set his sights on the surface of the Hudson.

With the plane's flaps out, speed dwindling fast and splashdown barely seconds away, Capt. Sullenberger asked his first officer: "Got any ideas?" Co-pilot Jeff Skiles instantly replied: "Actually not."

Once the plane settled in the water and the crew realized the fuselage remained intact, Capt. Sullenberger told the safety board, he turned toward his first officer and both instinctively blurted out at the same instant: "That wasn't as bad as I thought."

In a space of seven minutes, four rescue vessels surrounded the ditched airliner.

While the safety board's three-day hearing will delve into a broad range of technical and operational issues dealing with aircraft design and emergency escape issues, the indisputable star of the session was Capt. Sullenberger.
[Chesley Sully Sullenberger III, who ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, arrives for a hearing before the NTSB Tuesday in Washington.] Getty Images

Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III, who ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, arrives for a hearing before the NTSB Tuesday in Washington.

At a time when many commercial airline pilots say they are frustrated by dwindling pay, longer work weeks and eroded pensions, the testimony of the captain recalled the golden age of aviators exuding confidence and sangfroid.

Many of the flight attendants and passengers thought the Airbus was headed for land. But Capt. Sullenberger, who started flying at the age of 16 and has been at the controls of everything from gliders to three different jetliners, told the safety board he picked his landing spot with care.

The airline's training instructed pilots that if they ever had to ditch, they should "land near vessels to try to facilitate rescue."

Responding to questions about the lessons to be learned from the extraordinary landing, Capt. Sullenberger mentioned training to help pilots work together as a team and additional efforts to improve emergency evacuations. But his comments repeatedly swung back to the notion of an airline culture that stresses safety and respects the judgment of experienced pilots. US Airways pilots received classroom instruction in ditching procedures, but Capt. Sullenberger testified that they never practiced any ditching scenarios in simulators.

In a pointed remark on the cost-cutting and heightened corporate regimentation that currently drive many airlines, Capt. Sullenberger considered the intangibles of safe airmanship. "The captain's authority is a precious commodity that cannot be denigrated," he said.

The captain's testimony also highlighted the importance of relying on experience and memory, rather than rigidly using written checklists to deal with unexpected emergencies. With both pilots in the cockpit boasting about 20,000 hours of total flight time, Capt. Sullenberger said that teamwork and experience "allowed us to focus on the high priorities without referring to written" checklists.

Billy Campbell, one of the passengers on the plane, testified about seeing the left engine engulfed in flames as though it were "a bonfire," and then scampering out of the aircraft as water was seeping in near the tail. "We were so fortunate to have an unbelievable pilot, an unbelievable copilot" and a highly experienced cabin crew, he told the board.

Robert Sumwalt, the safety board member chairing the hearing, said that after listening to the cockpit voice recorder after the ditching of US Airways Flight 1549, he was impressed by the actions of the pilots. "I've never walked out of a flight recorder lab with a smile."

Bolivia's Death Road - The World's most dangerous road

2009-05-31T14:33:00.000-07:00

Bolivia's "Death Road" links La Paz to Coroico in the Yungas. Ride it from behind the wheel of a Range Rover Sport

Portable toilets help pilot survive crash

2009-05-05T16:51:00.000-07:00

TACOMA, Wash., May 3 (UPI) -- A pilot walked away from a crash landing in Washington state when a field full of portable toilets cushioned the impact on the ground for his small plane.

The 67-year-old pilot, whose name was not reported, had just taken off from Pierce County-Thun Field at 3:20 p.m. PDT Friday when his engine stopped, The Tacoma News-Tribune reported Saturday.

The Cessna 182 suffered apparent engine failure after taking off from Thun Field airfield south-east of Tacoma in Washington state.

He was alone in the 1982 Cessna.

"The plane took off, he got about 150 feet in the air and his engine quit running," Ed Troyer, a spokesman for the Pierce County Sheriff's Office, said. "He tried to turn around and come back and land, but he didn't quite make it."

As it fell, the plane hit a fence, flipped upside down (ick!) and landed on toilets being stored near the runway by the Northwest Cascade company.

"The Honey Buckets kind of cushioned things," a Northwest Cascade worker who did not want to be named told the News-Tribune.

The 67-year-old pilot, who was reported to have been flying alone, has not been identified.

Louisiana Sink Hole Drains Entire Lake

2009-03-21T12:16:00.000-07:00

When a Texaco oil rig mis-triangulates its drilling position and hits a nearby salt mine full of workers, an entire lake complete with homes, barges, and land drain into the enormous sink hole. Soon the river reverses direction and brings in water from the ocean, swallowing up more land.

World's Top 8 Stupid People

2009-03-03T05:45:00.000-08:00

Pilot Action May Have Led to Crash

2009-02-18T05:26:00.000-08:00

Flight Data Show Response to Loss of Speed Resulted in Deadly Stall That Downed Plane
By J. LYNN LUNSFORD and ANDY PASZTOR

Investigators examining last week's Continental Connection plane crash have gathered evidence that pilot commands -- not a buildup of ice on the wings and tail -- likely initiated the fatal dive of the twin-engine Bombardier Q400 into a neighborhood six miles short of the Buffalo, N.Y., airport, according to people familiar with the situation.

The commuter plane slowed to an unsafe speed as it approached the airport, causing an automatic stall warning, these people said. The pilot pulled back sharply on the plane's controls and added power instead of following the proper procedure of pushing forward to lower the plane's nose to regain speed, they said. He held the controls there, locking the airplane into a deadly stall, they added.

The crash on Feb. 12 at about 10:20 p.m. EST killed all 49 aboard and one person on the ground.

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A New York State trooper guides an overhead crane Tuesday to the crash site of Continental Connection Flight 3407 near Buffalo, N.Y.
Reuters

A New York State trooper guides an overhead crane Tuesday to the crash site of Continental Connection Flight 3407 near Buffalo, N.Y.
A New York State trooper guides an overhead crane Tuesday to the crash site of Continental Connection Flight 3407 near Buffalo, N.Y.
A New York State trooper guides an overhead crane Tuesday to the crash site of Continental Connection Flight 3407 near Buffalo, N.Y.

The investigation is still at an early stage, and National Transportation Safety Board officials have warned about ruling out potential causes or prematurely jumping to conclusions. But in the past few days, government and industry crash experts have gained a better understanding of the sequence of events as they have compared information from the plane's flight recorders with radar and weather data.

Mark Rosenker, the NTSB's acting chairman, said Tuesday that investigators still have "lots of data that needs to be examined," and "still more evidence that needs to be collected," before announcing firm conclusions.

The Q400 was operated by Colgan Air Inc., an unit of Pinnacle Airlines Inc., which was operating the flight on behalf of Continental Airlines Inc. Joe Williams, a spokesman for Pinnacle, declined to comment about details of the accident while the safety board was investigating. A spokeswoman for the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents the pilots, declined to comment.

Investigators initially focused their attention on potential ice buildup on the plane's wings -- a perpetual hazard of aviation. People familiar with the investigation cautioned that they still aren't sure whether icing may have played a contributing role in the crash because it was on the minds of the pilots, but they noted that another Q400 flew through "moderate" icing conditions on the same route from Newark, N.J., to Buffalo the same night, landing without incident less than an hour after the crash.

A Bombardier spokesman said Tuesday that the company is "not aware of any serious icing incident on this aircraft" since it was introduced into service in February 2000.

According to people familiar with the investigation, Capt. Marvin Renslow, 47 years old, who lived outside Tampa, Fla., was at the controls of Flight 3407. The safety board said Mr. Renslow was relatively new to the Q400, which he began flying only in December, when he upgraded from another type of airplane. First Officer Rebecca Lynne Shaw, 24, of Seattle, had accumulated 774 hours in the 74-seat aircraft.

The recovered flight data described in detail how the crew of Continental Flight 3407 handled the emergency, the people said.

During the flight from Newark, Mr. Renslow and Ms. Shaw noticed ice building up on the windshield and wings of the airplane after they had already activated the craft's de-icing system, which inflates a series of rubber bladders on the leading edge of the wings and tail surfaces to break up accumulated ice.

According to the plane's flight recorders, Flight 3407's descent into Buffalo was routine until roughly a minute before impact, when the crew lowered the landing gear, followed by the command to extend the wing flaps, which enable the plane to fly at slower speeds.

Almost immediately, these people say, the plane's air speed slowed rapidly, causing a stall-warning device known as a "stick-shaker" to cause the pilots' control column to vibrate. This was followed by a "stick-pusher," which automatically forces the stick forward.

At this point, the captain appears to have pulled back with enough force to overpower the stick-pusher and shoved the throttles to full power, according to people familiar with the matter. Safety board officials said the nose pitched up to a 31-degree angle. Already at a dangerously low speed, the wings immediately stopped generating lift. The plane whipped to the left and then entered a steep right turn, losing 800 feet of altitude in less than five seconds. At one point the right wing was perpendicular to the ground, according to information taken from the flight data recorder.

The pilots continued to fight with the controls almost all the way to the ground, and in the final moments, "it appeared that they were beginning to make headway when they ran out of altitude," said one person who looked at the data.

A crash with many similarities occurred five years ago involving a regional jet operated by Pinnacle. Following that crash, which killed the two pilots outside Jefferson City, Mo., the safety board urged Pinnacle and other commuter operations to revamp training procedures, including how to recover from certain types of stalls. Investigators are seeking more information from Pinnacle about how it changed its procedures in the wake of the previous crash, as well as specific details about the training provided for the pilots on Flight 3407.

Pinnacle's Mr. Williams said that following the previous crash, "we continually evaluated our procedures in accordance with our commitment to safety."

Continental Airlines Plane Crashes in Buffalo, N.Y.

2009-02-13T05:54:00.000-08:00

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A Continental Express plane crashed into a suburban Buffalo home and erupted in flames, killing all 48 people aboard, state police said.

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Plane crash in Buffalo
Associated Press

A plane burns after it crashed into a house in Clarence Center, N.Y.
Plane crash in Buffalo
Plane crash in Buffalo

Authorities say Flight 3407 from Newark, N.J., hit a house in Clarence around 10:10 p.m. Thursday.

Clarence emergency control director Dave Bissonet says the crash killed one person on the ground. He says the plane was approaching Buffalo Niagara International Airport, about 10 miles away.

Twelve homes near the crash site have been evacuated.

Continental Airlines says the Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 operated by Manassas, Va.-based Colgan Air was operating between Newark Liberty International Airport and Buffalo Niagara International Airport.

Lake Jump Catastrophe

2009-01-30T12:04:00.000-08:00

US Airways Plane Crashes in Hudson River

2009-01-15T14:15:00.000-08:00

On ice ... as workers on shore watch, a crane hoists the wreckage of the US Airways airplane that crashed in the Hudson River out of the icy river in New York
THE pilot who safely brought down a stricken Airbus described flying into a wall of large birds just after take-off, officials said today.

Terrifying details of the US Airways flight's last moments before a successful crash-landing in New York's Hudson River emerged as officials reported advances in the difficult salvage operation.

Testimony from pilot Chesley Sullenberger, credited with saving the lives of all 155 aboard, made it clear that a collision with a flock of birds, possibly geese, crippled the engines and triggered disaster.

The cockpit windscreen "was literally filled with big, dark brown birds," Sullenberger told investigators, said Kitty Higgins, from the National Transport Safety Board (NTSB). "He said his instinct was to duck, but he didn't."

Simultaneously, the pilot and co-pilot "heard booms, felt the impact, the power went down and they smelled - this is the captain saying - they smelled 'burning birds.'"

Earlier today (AEDT), giant cranes were ready to start lifting the nearly sunken plane from the icy Hudson, the NTSB said.

The operation, likely to take a long time, will allow recovery of the black box flight recorders located in the tail.

Search crews also think they have found the Airbus' left engine, which was torn off in the crash and sank, the NTSB said.

This had still to be confirmed, but finding the engine will aid investigators trying to confirm whether the jets stopped after large birds were sucked into the turbines.

At the time of the impact, the plane's co-pilot was at the controls.

He noticed a flock of birds to the right and commented on their perfect line formation, Higgins told a news conference.

"I think he believed, based on what he saw, that they were going to fly under the plane," Higgins recounted.

"When (the captain) looked up, he said the windscreen was filled with birds," Higgins said.

With both engines out, the captain decided that the only place he could land without endangering people on the ground was the Hudson.

The captain said he decided against returning to LaGuardia because he was "too low, too slow, they were pointed the wrong way and they had to traverse a populated area," Higgins told the news conference.

An alternative airport was also ruled because as "it was a populated area, the consequences would have been catastrophic."

Sullenberger took over control of the plane and "lowered the nose to try and counteract the loss of airspeed," Higgins said.

"While the captain was flying the aircraft, the first officer was trying desperately to restart the engines," Higgins said.

"There was very little conversation. These are both experienced pilots. They both knew what they had to do."

After a perfect water landing, all 150 passengers and five crew were able to walk out of the sinking aircraft and enter rescue boats.

Sullenberger told investigators that in line with standard procedures, he had brought down the plane close to a boat he saw on the river so that help would be near, Higgins said.

The Airbus's entire flight, from take-off to splash landing in the Hudson, lasted about five minutes, Higgins said.

Security camera film footage released today showed for the first time the moment of impact.

Water shoots up as the plane makes a perfectly straight landing - a brilliant piece of handling that experts say prevented a tragic break-up of the plane.

Crew members didn't even realise where they were at first, the NTSB said.

There was "one impact, no bounce, a gradual deceleration and neither one of them realised they were in the water," Higgins said. "The captain issued a one word demand: evacuate."

Crew interviews also confirmed reports of how the Sullenberger refused to leave his sinking plane until he was sure everyone was safe.

"He was very concerned with the count of the passengers," the flight crew told the NTSB, Higgins said.

"He wanted everyone accounted for. He returned to the plane a couple of times to check no one was there. The captain was the last off."

funny water

2008-07-16T11:22:00.000-07:00

Ferry Tale

2008-05-19T17:46:00.000-07:00

http://view.break.com/502651 - Watch more free videos

The lives of elevators.

2008-04-15T04:54:00.000-07:00

Up and Then Down
The lives of elevators.
by Nick Paumgarten

The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.

The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.

The control panel made a beep, and White waited a moment, expecting a voice to offer information or instructions. None came. He pressed the intercom button, but there was no response. He hit it again, and then began pacing around the elevator. After a time, he pressed the emergency button, setting off an alarm bell, mounted on the roof of the elevator car, but he could tell that its range was limited. Still, he rang it a few more times and eventually pulled the button out, so that the alarm was continuous. Some time passed, although he was not sure how much, because he had no watch or cell phone. He occupied himself with thoughts of remaining calm and decided that he’d better not do anything drastic, because, whatever the malfunction, he thought it unwise to jostle the car, and because he wanted to be (as he thought, chuckling to himself) a model trapped employee. He hoped, once someone came to get him, to appear calm and collected. He did not want to be scolded for endangering himself or harming company property. Nor did he want to be caught smoking, should the doors suddenly open, so he didn’t touch his cigarettes. He still had three, plus two Rolaids, which he worried might dehydrate him, so he left them alone. As the emergency bell rang and rang, he began to fear that it might somehow—electricity? friction? heat?—start a fire. Recently, there had been a small fire in the building, rendering the elevators unusable. The Business Week staff had walked down forty-three stories. He also began hearing unlikely oscillations in the ringing: aural hallucinations. Before long, he began to contemplate death.

Ask a vertical-transportation-industry professional to recall an episode of an elevator in free fall—the cab plummeting in the shaftway, frayed rope ends trailing in the dark—and he will say that he can think of only one. That would be the Empire State Building incident of 1945, in which a B-25 bomber pilot made a wrong turn in the fog and crashed into the seventy-ninth floor, snapping the hoist and safety cables of two elevators. Both of them plunged to the bottom of the shaft. One of them fell from the seventy-fifth floor with a woman aboard—an elevator operator. (The operator of the other one had stepped out for a cigarette.) By the time the car crashed into the buffer in the pit (a hydraulic truncheon designed to be a cushion of last resort), a thousand feet of cable had piled up beneath it, serving as a kind of spring. A pillow of air pressure, as the speeding car compressed the air in the shaft, may have helped ease the impact as well. Still, the landing was not soft. The car’s walls buckled, and steel debris tore up through the floor. It was the woman’s good fortune to be cowering in a corner when the car hit. She was severely injured but alive.

Traction elevators—the ones hanging from ropes, as opposed to dumbwaiters, or mining elevators, or those lifted by hydraulic pumps—are typically borne aloft by six or eight hoist cables, each of which, according to the national elevator-safety code (and the code determines all), is capable on its own of supporting the full load of the elevator plus twenty-five per cent more weight. Another line, the governor cable, is connected to a device that detects if the elevator car is descending at a rate twenty-five per cent faster than its maximum designed speed. If that happens, the device trips the safeties, bronze shoes that run along vertical rails in the shaft. These brakes are designed to stop the car quickly, but not so abruptly as to cause injury. They work. This is why free falling, at least, is so rare.

Still, elevator lore has its share of horrors: strandings, manglings, fires, drownings, decapitations. An estimated two hundred people were killed in elevators at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—some probably in free-fall plunges, but many by fire, smoke, or entrapment and subsequent structural collapse. The elevator industry likes to insist that, short of airplane rammings, most accidents are the result of human error, of passengers or workers doing things they should not. Trying to run in through closing doors is asking for trouble; so is climbing up into an elevator car, or down out of one, when it is stuck between floors, or letting a piece of equipment get lodged in the brake, as happened to a service elevator at 5 Times Square, in Manhattan, four years ago, causing the counterweight to plummet (the counterweight, which aids an elevator’s rise and slows its descent, is typically forty per cent heavier than an empty car) and the elevator to shoot up, at sixty miles an hour, into the beams at the top of the shaft, killing the attendant inside. Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable.

Nonetheless, elevators are extraordinarily safe—far safer than cars, to say nothing of other forms of vertical transport. Escalators are scary. Statistics are elusive (“Nobody collects them,” Edward Donoghue, the managing director of the trade organization National Elevator Industry, said), but the claim, routinely advanced by elevator professionals, that elevators are ten times as safe as escalators seems to arise from fifteen-year-old numbers showing that, while there are roughly twenty times as many elevators as escalators, there are only a third more elevator accidents. An average of twenty-six people die in (or on) elevators in the United States every year, but most of these are people being paid to work on them. That may still seem like a lot, until you consider that that many die in automobiles every five hours. In New York City, home to fifty-eight thousand elevators, there are eleven billion elevator trips a year—thirty million every day—and yet hardly more than two dozen passengers get banged up enough to seek medical attention. The Otis Elevator Company, the world’s oldest and biggest elevator manufacturer, claims that its products carry the equivalent of the world’s population every five days. As the world urbanizes—every year, in developing countries, sixty million people move into cities—the numbers will go up, and up and down.

Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete. And the elevator is energy-efficient—the counterweight does a great deal of the work, and the new systems these days regenerate electricity. The elevator is a hybrid, by design.

While anthems have been written to jet travel, locomotives, and the lure of the open road, the poetry of vertical transportation is scant. What is there to say, besides that it goes up and down? In “The Intuitionist,” Colson Whitehead’s novel about elevator inspectors, the conveyance itself is more conceit than thing; the plot concerns, among other things, the quest for a “black box,” a perfect elevator, but the nature of its perfection remains mysterious. Onscreen, there has been “The Shaft” (“Your next stop . . . is hell”), a movie about a deadly malfunctioning elevator system in a Manhattan tower, which had the misfortune of coming out the Friday before September 11th, and a scattering of inaccurate set pieces in action movies, such as “Speed.” (There are no ladders or lights in most shafts.) Movies and television programs, such as “Boston Legal” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” often rely on the elevator to bring characters together, as a kind of artificial enforcement of proximity and conversation. The brevity of the ride suits the need for a stretch of witty or portentous dialogue, for stolen kisses and furtive arguments. For some people, the elevator ride is a social life.

When filmmakers want to shoot an elevator scene, they will spin the elevator around, like a lazy Susan, so that the character can disembark into a different set. This trick captures something about an elevator ride—the way that it can feel like teleportation. You go in here and come out there, and you hardly consider that you have just raced up or down a vertiginous, pitch-black shaft. When you’re waiting for a ride, you don’t think that what lurks behind the outer doors is emptiness. Every so often, a door opens when it shouldn’t and someone steps into the void. This is worth keeping in mind.

People don’t like to ride in elevators or wait for them. Many people can’t even get in one, or would really rather not. “They’re not psychotic,” Jerilyn Ross, a cognitive-behavioral therapist in Washington and the president of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America, said recently. “It’s just a misfiring of the fight-or-flight response.” Elevator phobia is a kind of claustrophobia, and as such the fear is as much of experiencing fear—of having a panic attack, in an enclosed space—as it is of the thing itself. One of Ross’s board members is David Hoberman, who produced the television series “Monk,” several episodes of which have touched on Detective Monk’s elevator phobia. “I have it,” Hoberman said recently. “It’s for real. I avoid elevators at all costs.” His least favorite are the ones in small doctors’-office buildings, in the Valley.

Hoberman has been undergoing behavioral elevator therapy for six months. His therapist began by taking him to the U.C.L.A. psychology department and locking him in a black box about the size of a phone booth. The first time, Hoberman lasted just five seconds. After four or five sessions, he could handle ten minutes. Before long, he and his therapist were riding elevators together, all over campus. He just built a house in Los Angeles, and it has an elevator, because his parents insisted that it will be useful to him when he grows old. “I will never ride in it,” Hoberman said. “I don’t have a fear of dying in an elevator, or of the elevator losing control—I have a fear of being stuck with my mind.”

Nicholas White wasn’t phobic, but he wasn’t exactly fond of elevators. When he was a boy, he and some other kids were trapped in one on their way down from a birthday party in an apartment building on Riverside Drive. After about twenty minutes, the Fire Department pulled the kids out, one at a time. In his recollection, he was the only person to ask the firemen whether the cables might snap.

White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice—it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)

After a while, White decided to smoke a cigarette. It was conceivable to him that, owing to construction work in the lobby, the building staff had taken his car out of service and would leave it that way not only through the weekend but all through the week. That they could leave him here as long as they had suggested that anything was possible. He imagined them opening the doors, ten days later, and finding him dead on his back, like a cockroach. Within hours, he had smoked all his cigarettes.

At a certain point, he decided to open the doors. He pried them apart and held them open with his foot. He was presented with a cinder-block wall on which, perfectly centered, were scrawled three “13”s—one in chalk, one in red paint, one in black. It was a dispiriting sight. He concluded that he must be on the thirteenth floor, and that, this being an express elevator, there was no egress from the shaft anywhere for many stories up or down. (Such a shaft is known as a blind hoistway.) He peered down through the crack between the wall and the sill of the elevator and saw that it was very dark. He could make out some light at the bottom. It looked far away. A breeze blew up the shaft.

He started to call out. “Hello?” He tried cupping his hand to his mouth and yelled out some more. “Help! Is there anybody there? I’m stuck in an elevator!” He kept at it for a while.

Until recently, one of New York City’s most notoriously dysfunctional elevator banks could be found at the Marriott Marquis hotel, a forty-nine-story convention mill in Times Square, built in the early eighties, where glass elevators are arrayed like petals around a stalk of concrete, in the center of a vast atrium. For years, visitors complained of waits of as much as twenty minutes.

One morning not long ago, I met James Fortune, the man who designed that elevator system, in the lobby of the Marriott. Fortune, an affable industrial engineer originally from Pasadena, can reasonably disavow responsibility for the hotel’s elevator failings; a decision to put the lobby on the eighth floor essentially doubled the amount of work the elevators had to do to get guests to their rooms. (“The building’s underelevatored,” he told me, with a grimace. “We did the best we could.”) Fortune is probably the world’s busiest and best-known elevator consultant, especially in the category of super-tall towers—buildings of more than a hundred stories—which are proliferating around the world, owing in large part to elevator solutions provided by men like Fortune. Elevator consultants come in various guises. Some make the bulk of their living by testifying in court in accident lawsuits. Others collaborate with architects and developers to handle the human traffic in big buildings. Fortune is one of those.

Four years ago, Fortune, who is sixty-six, retired as president of the pioneering elevator consulting firm Lerch Bates, but his retirement lasted just two weeks. He couldn’t resist the call of the elevator. He started a new firm, with headquarters in the relatively horizontal and un-elevatored city of Galveston, Texas—the majority of his work is overseas, especially in Asia and the Middle East, and the Houston airport is relatively central. In China alone, there are dozens of cities with a population of more than two million and, Fortune noted, “every city wants an iconic tower.” Persian Gulf cities like Doha and Dubai are a blizzard of elevator jobs.

Fortune has done the elevators, as they say, in five of the world’s ten tallest buildings. While at Lerch Bates, he did the tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101 Tower, which has the fastest elevators in the world—rising at more than fifty-five feet per second, or about thirty-five miles an hour. The cars are pressurized, to prevent ear damage. He also did Burj Dubai, which, when it is completed, next year, will be the new tallest building, at least until it is supplanted by another one he is working on in the region. Burj Dubai will have forty-six elevators, including two double-deckers that will go straight to the top. (“I love double-decks,” Fortune said.) Adrian Smith, the building’s architect, has grand designs for towers reaching hundreds of stories—vertical cities—which would require a sophistication of conveyance not yet available. Two weeks ago, a Saudi prince announced a plan for a mile-high tower in a new city being built near Jidda—more than twice as tall as Burj Dubai. Fortune is bidding on that one, too. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a mile-high, five-hundred-and-twenty-eight-story tower, called the Mile-High Illinois, in 1956, a kind of architectural manifesto of density. Wright allowed for seventy-six elevators—atomic-powered quintuple-deckers, rising at sixty miles an hour. “I ran the studies once,” Fortune said. “He wasn’t even close. He should’ve had two hundred and fifteen to two hundred and twenty-five elevators.”

While the Marriott’s capsule-like elevators sped up and down, Fortune explained some of the rudiments of elevatoring. The term “elevatoring” refers to the discipline of designing a building’s elevator system: how many, how big, how fast, and so on. You need to predict how many people will be using the elevators, and how they’ll go about their business. It isn’t rocket science, but it has its nuances and complications. The elevator consultant George Strakosch, in the preface to “The Vertical Transportation Handbook,” the industry bible, refers to it as the “obscure mystery.” To take elevatoring lightly is to risk dooming a building to dysfunction and its inhabitants to a kind of incremental purgatory.

In elevatoring, as in life, the essential variables are time and space. A well-elevatored building gets you up and down quickly, without giving up too much square footage to elevator banks. Especially with super-tall towers, the amount of core space that one must devote to elevators, in order to convey so many people so high, can make a building architecturally or economically infeasible. This limitation served to stunt the height of skyscrapers until, in 1973, the designers of the World Trade Center introduced the idea of sky lobbies. A sky lobby is like a transfer station: an express takes you there, and then you switch to a local. (As it happens, Fortune was working on a project to upgrade the Trade Center elevators when the towers were destroyed.)

There are two basic elevatoring metrics. One is handling capacity: your aim is to carry a certain percentage of the building’s population in five minutes. Thirteen per cent is a good target. The other is the interval, or frequency of service: the average round-trip time of one elevator, divided by the number of elevators. In an American office building, you want the interval to be below thirty seconds, and the average waiting time to be about sixty per cent of that. Any longer, and people get upset. In a residential building or a hotel, the tolerance goes up, but only by ten or twenty seconds. In the nineteen-sixties, many builders cheated a little—accepting, say, a thirty-four-second interval, and 11.5 per cent handling capacity—and came to regret it. Generally, England is over-elevatored; India is under-elevatored.

Fortune carries a “probable stop” table, which applies probability to the vexation that boils up when each passenger presses a button for a different floor. If there are ten people in an elevator that serves ten floors, it will likely make 6.5 stops. Ten people, thirty floors: 9.5 stops. (The table does not account for the exasperating phantom stop, when no one gets on or off.) Other factors are door open and close time, loading and unloading time, acceleration rate, and deceleration rate, which must be swift but gentle. You hear that interfloor traffic kills—something to mutter, perhaps, when a co-worker boards the elevator to travel one flight, especially if that co-worker is planning, at day’s end, to spend half an hour on a StairMaster. It’s also disastrous to have a cafeteria on anything but the ground floor, or one floor above or below it, accessible via escalator.

An over-elevatored building wastes space and deprives a landlord of revenue. An under-elevatored building suffers on the rental or resale market, and drives its tenants nuts. In extreme cases, when the wait becomes actually long, instead of merely perceptibly long, things fall apart. The Bronx family-court system, for example, was in a shambles last year because the elevators at its courthouse kept breaking down. (The stairs are closed, owing to security concerns.) This led to hour-long waits, which led to missed court dates, needless arrest warrants, and life-altering family strife.

Fortune took me elevator riding. Riding elevators, even when you are supposed to be paying attention, for the purpose of writing about them, is a pretty banal enterprise. So it was hard to focus on the matter at hand—not to just ride, expressionless and empty-brained, per usual, noting nothing, except that on the Captivate screen the word of the day was “sitzmark.” Otis has conducted research to find out whether people might better enjoy their time in elevators if it were more of an experience—if it would somehow help to emphasize that they’re in an elevator, hurtling up and down a shaft. Otis found, to little surprise, that people would rather be distracted from that fact. Even elevator music, designed to put passengers at ease, is now so closely associated with elevators that it is no longer widely used.

But there were a few attention-getting features at the Marriott. One was that the glass cabs allow you to see the elevator’s various components, and also how fast you’re going—a thrill or a trial, depending on your temperament or, according to Fortune, your gender. In his experience, most women face the door, away from the glass, to avoid the sight of the mezzanines flying by.

The other was the “destination dispatch” system that the Marriott introduced, a few years ago, becoming the first hotel in North America to do so. Such “smart elevators” have now been installed in a dozen buildings in New York, among them the headquarters of the Times, of Hearst, and of the News Corporation. Destination dispatch assigns passengers to an elevator according to which floors they’re going to, in an attempt to send each car to as few floors as possible. You enter your floor number at a central control panel in the lobby and are told which elevator to take.

With destination dispatch, the wait in the lobby may be longer, but the trip is shorter. And the waiting may not grate as much, because you know which car is yours. In Japan, the light over your prospective elevator lights up (“arrival immediate prediction lantern,” in the vulgate of vertical transportation), even if the elevator isn’t there yet, to account for what the Japanese call “psychological waiting time.” It’s like a nod of acknowledgment from a busy bartender.

Smart elevators are strange elevators, because there is no control panel in the car; the elevator knows where you are going. People tend to find it unnerving to ride in an elevator with no buttons; they feel as if they had been kidnapped by a Bond villain. Helplessness may exacerbate claustrophobia. In the old system—board elevator, press button—you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they’re driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception—to disguise not only the bare fact of the box hanging by ropes but also the tethering of tenants to a system over which they have no command. The biggest drawback of destination dispatch, besides the anxiety of novelty, is that once you are in an elevator you cannot change your mind. To amend your floor choice, you must disembark, and start again. Elevator mind-changing—the sudden lunge for the unlit button—is rare enough; still, the option is nice. Also, when you get used to this system, you get into an elevator with buttons and forget to press one. But sometimes that happens anyway.

Destination dispatch, strictly speaking, was introduced eighteen years ago, by Schindler, the Swiss conglomerate, but a version of it was developed in the thirties, by the A. B. See Elevator Company, founded by the noted anti-feminist A. B. See (“If the world had had to depend on the inventive and constructive ability of women, we should still be sleeping on the plains”). Without the microprocessor, however, it was hard to implement. Schindler’s version, the Miconic 10, was developed by an engineer named Joris Schroeder, who has written dense essays about his “passenger-second minimizing cost-of-service algorithm.” Schindler claims that its system is up to thirty per cent more efficient than standard elevators. The other big manufacturers have come out with similar systems and make similar claims. In each, every bank of elevators has its own group-dispatch logic—which elevator picks up whom, and so on. “They have to talk to each other,” Fortune said. We have to trust that they are reasonable.

The first American building to use smart elevators, the Ameritech building, in Indianapolis, hired mimes to help people navigate the system. They are still rare enough so that the Marriott has an attendant on hand to assist bewildered guests. “It’s tricky putting this system into a building where people are always unfamiliar with it,” Fortune said. “By the time they know it, they leave.”

Fortune suggested that we go see 7 World Trade Center, a two-year-old building, of unspectacular height (fifty-two stories, seven hundred and fifty feet), because, he said, “it is the most advanced system going.” The elevators were Otis—Larry Silverstein, the building’s developer, is a longtime Otis man—and their destination-dispatch system is integrated with the security system; it reads your I.D. card at a turnstile and assigns you to an elevator. “The next phase of this is face-recognition biometrics,” Fortune said.

Otis had a full-time mechanic on site at 7 World Trade. His name was Sean Moran. He was hanging out by the turnstiles when we walked in, and Fortune asked how it was going with the dispatch system. “People are sheep,” Moran said. “They look, they go.”

We rode up to Floor 38, on Elevator D1. Facing down the urge to press a button in a buttonless elevator felt a little like quitting smoking. Fortune explained that, newfangled as destination dispatch may seem, it is in many respects a reversion to the old ways. “This is going to sound crazy, but we’re coming full circle,” Fortune said. In the early days, you’d have an operator in each car and a licensed attendant, or dispatcher, in the lobby, who would tell people where to go. The operator typically was a woman and the dispatcher a man, and he tended to know the name, face, and status of each tenant. He could assign elevators to contiguous floors and tell the gals when to leave and direct the boss to an empty, momentarily private elevator. “He was the logic,” Fortune said. When systems converted to automatic, in the middle of the last century, and operators and dispatchers disappeared, that central logician was lost, and lobbies descended into randomness.

Fortune and I changed elevators and went to one of the top floors, a vacant expanse with views in every direction: a forest of elevator shafts. The elevator professional sees the city with a kind of X-ray vision, revealing a hidden array of elevator genera—an Otis gearless, a Schindler, a Fujitec. For him, buildings are mere ornaments disguising the elevators that serve them. Below us was the pit where the Freedom Tower would go, but to Fortune it was ThyssenKrupp, which had recently underbid Otis for the job.

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator. Most people make allowances for the continuation of generic small talk already under way, or, in residential buildings, for neighborly amenities. The orthodox enforcers of silence—the elevator Quakers—must suffer the moderates or the serial abusers, as they cram in exchanges about the night, the game, the weekend, or the meal.

Bodies need to fit. Designers of public spaces have devised a maximum average unit size—that is, they’ve figured out how much space a person takes up, and how little of it he or she can abide. The master fitter is John J. Fruin, the author of “Pedestrian Planning and Design,” which was published in 1971 and reprinted, in 1987, by Elevator World, the publisher of the leading industry magazine, Elevator World. (Its January issue came with 3-D glasses, for viewing its best-new-elevator-of-the-year layout, of the Dexia BIL Banking Center, in Luxembourg.) Fruin introduced the concept of the “body ellipse,” a bird’s-eye graphic representation of an individual’s personal space. It’s essentially a shoulder-width oval with a head in the middle. He employed a standard set of near-maximum human dimensions: twenty-four inches wide (at the shoulders) and eighteen inches deep. If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the “touch zone”; seven square feet as the “no-touch zone”; and ten square feet as the “personal-comfort zone.” Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range—less than eighteen inches between people—“intimate distance,” the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, “Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.”

The standard elevator measure is about two square feet per passenger—intimate, disturbing. “Elevators represent a special circumstance in which pedestrians are willing to submit to closer spacing than they would normally accept,” Fruin wrote, without much parsing the question of willingness. The book contains a pair of overhead photographs, part of an experiment conducted by Otis, of elevators loaded to capacity (by design, cabs are nearly impossible to overweight, unless the passengers are extremely tall). In one, a car is full of women, each of whom has 1.5 square feet of space. In the other, there are men as well as women, and each passenger gets 1.8 square feet per person: men are larger, and women, in their presence, try to claim more space, often by crossing their arms. It is worth noting that, in experiments with prisoners, researchers found that violent or schizophrenic inmates preferred more than fifteen times this area.

There’s a higher tolerance in Asia than in the United States for tight rides and long waits. “In China, you’ll get twenty-five people in a four-thousand-pound car,” Rick Pulling, the head of high-rise operations at Otis, told me. “That’s unheard of here.” Pulling said that at the Otis headquarters in Hong Kong people wait patiently in line for the elevators, behind a velvet rope overseen by an attendant, and cram in. “New Yorkers wouldn’t stand for it,” Pulling said. “He’d have two broken legs.”

Nicholas White opened the doors to urinate. As he did so, he hoped, in vain, that a trace of this violation might get the attention of someone in the lobby. He considered lighting matches and dropping them down the shaft, to attract notice, but still had the presence of mind to suspect that this might not be wise. The alarm bell kept ringing. He paced and waved at the overhead camera. He couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. To pass the time, he opened his wallet and compared an old twenty-dollar bill with a new one, and read the fine print on the back of a pair of tickets to a Jets game on Sunday afternoon, which he would never get to use. He imagined himself as Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape,” throwing the baseball against the wall. Eventually, he lay down on the floor, intent on sleep. The carpet was like coarse AstroTurf, and was lousy with nail trimmings and other detritus. It was amazing to him how much people could shed in such a short trip. He used his shoes for a pillow and laid his wallet, unfolded, over his eyes to keep out the light. It wasn’t hot, yet he was sweating. His wallet was damp. Maybe a day had passed. He drifted in and out of sleep, awakening each time to the grim recognition that his elevator confinement had not been a dream. His thirst was overpowering. The alarm was playing more aural tricks on him, so he decided to turn it off. Then he tried doing some Morse code with it. He yelled some more. He tried to pick away at the cinder-block wall.

At a certain point, he decided to go for the escape hatch in the ceiling. He thought of Bruce Willis in “Die Hard,” climbing up and down the shaft. He knew it was a dangerous and desperate thing to do, but he didn’t care. He had to get out of the elevator. The height of the handrail in the car made it hard for him to get a leg up. It took him a while to figure out and then execute the maneuver that would allow him to spring up to the escape hatch. Finally, he swung himself up. The hatch was locked.

A vertical-transportation axiom states that if an elevator is in trouble the safest place to be is inside the elevator. This holds even if the elevator is not in trouble. Elevator surfing—riding on top of the cab, for kicks—is dangerous. This is why the escape hatch is always locked. By law, it’s bolted shut, from the outside. It’s there so that emergency personnel can get in, not so passengers can get out.

You can get a fair sense of the perils of an elevator shaft by watching an elevator rush up and down one, its counterweight flying by, like the blade on a guillotine. The elevator companies I talked to wouldn’t let me ride on top of a car or get into a hoistway; just to see a machine room, I was required to sign a release and don a hard hat, safety glasses, and steel-toed boots. For a good look at the innards, I had to leave New York, city of elevators, and drive up to Otis’s testing center, in Bristol, Connecticut.

The Otis test tower rises twenty-eight stories above an office park, at the base of a wooded ridge. It’s the only tall building for miles around. Its hazy-day gray color and near-windowlessness suggest a top-secret military installation, a bat tower, or the monolith from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In one way, it’s the most over-elevatored building in the world; all it is, really, is elevators—twelve test hoistways, plus a regular elevator. That one gets busy. The wait can be as long as thirteen minutes.

Otis was founded by Elisha Graves Otis, who invented the safety brake in 1853, and who is therefore usually thought of, in the simplistic way of historical innovation accreditation, as the inventor of the elevator. Mechanical hoists go back at least as far as Archimedes, and many men, not all of them employed by Otis, did their part to make the elevator work. Otis, having absorbed or outlasted all its native rivals, and gone through one of the first-ever hostile takeovers (by United Technologies, in 1976), is the last big American elevator company. Its major global competitors are Schindler, ThyssenKrupp, Kone, and Mitsubishi—Swiss, German, Finnish, and Japanese. The action is overseas. Otis does about eighty per cent of its business outside the United States, especially in the high-rise boomtowns of the Gulf states and in China. (Fortune had told me that, prestige aside, the super-tall tower jobs are basically loss leaders for the elevator companies: “Very few high-rise jobs are money makers. You give ’em away for the maintenance contract.”)

It was Rick Pulling, Otis’s felicitously named high-rise man and the company’s chief envoy, who took me around the test tower. He has worked at Otis for twenty-three years. He has an air of world-weariness, earned perhaps in complicated dealings with foreign builders and governments, but it gave way to fervid evangelism when the subject turned, as it did very quickly, to elevators. “We’ll wait ten to fifteen minutes for a train, without complaining,” he said. “But wait thirty seconds for an elevator and the world’s coming to an end. Which means, really, that we’ve done a good job. We deliver short waits. But why are we held to a different standard?”

Our first stop, on the ground floor, was the so-called “drop car,” a rudimentary elevator platform stacked with dozens of hundred-and-fifty-pound lead plates. The Otis engineers use it to test overspeed stopping—free-fall prevention. The drop car shares a hoistway with another half-elevator, from which a tester can examine the performance of safety brake shoes. Piles of them were on the floor, like discarded lobster claws. It takes just a couple of feet for the brakes to engage. Over several weeks, the drop car lurches down the hoistway, from the top of the building to the ground, in mini-free-fall intervals that make the notion of an eighty-floor drop seem both ludicrous and newly horrifying.

To the age-old half-serious question of whether a passenger barrelling earthward in a runaway elevator should jump in the air just before impact, Pulling responded, as vertical-transportation professionals ceaselessly must, that you can’t jump up fast enough to counteract the rate of descent. “And how are you supposed to know when to jump?” he said. As for an alternative strategy—lie flat on the floor?—he shrugged: “Dead’s dead.”

All through the building, you could hear the clicking and whirring of elevators. We rode up to the twenty-eighth floor, a single vast room, with various hoistway openings in the floor, like crevasses. Men in hard hats were futzing with a control panel. “We’re interpreting the data before we proceed,” one of them said. In a corner was the 70T, a fourteen-ton turbine of steel about the size of a VW Beetle, capable of hauling seventy tons at fifty feet a second. In another corner there was a full-sized working replica of the “Improved Hoisting Apparatus,” a suspended wooden platform that looked a bit like a gallows, which Elisha Otis had débuted at the Crystal Palace, in 1854, to demonstrate his new brake. Standing on the platform, high above the ground, he had an assistant cut the hoist rope with an axe, and before the platform could fall a wagon spring engaged a toggle on a cogged rail, and the hoisting apparatus held.

From one incarnation to the other, the basic principles—car, sheave, rope, safety—remain the same. With the exception of a few quantum leaps—steel cable, electricity, microprocessing—elevator advancements have been subtle and incremental. On the twenty-fifth floor, we came across evidence of one: spools of flat, rubbery-looking cable. In recent years, Otis has introduced flat hoist belts, made of polyurethane threaded with steel, which are lighter, stronger, and more energy-efficient than the old steel ropes. (Otis gave its employees gifts of belts made out of the cable.) The flat cables have made possible much smaller machines, facilitating the proliferation of what are called, rather inelegantly, “machineroomless” elevators. A machine the size of a marmot, rather than of a moose, can be installed in the shaft, rather than in a room of its own, freeing up space for architects and landlords. This is what passes for cutting edge.

The big ideas tend to falter on the laws of physics. A single elevator can climb no higher than seventeen hundred feet. A hoist rope any longer is too heavy to be practical; at thirty-two hundred feet, it will snap, like a stream of spit in a stairwell. A decade ago, Otis developed a prototype of a conveyance called Odyssey, which could slide out of its shaft and travel on a horizontal track to another shaft, with the help of a linear induction motor. It was scuttled by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The rising cost of electricity has confounded other lofty dreams, like the ropeless elevator.

We rode downstairs, to an immaculate warehouse space called the Quality Assurance Center—“The engineer’s playground,” Pulling called it—where Otis components were subjected to wear-and-tear tests. Kiln-like machines exposed parts to heavy doses of heat, dust, and salt fog. Hoist belts underwent twenty years of jerking and pulling in a few months. The only hint of novelty, of futuristic aspiration and delight—of Willy Wonka’s flying glass elevator or Colson Whitehead’s black box or the long-imagined elevator to the moon—was a hundred-foot-long gray mat. It happened to trace Odyssey’s vestigial test course—the abandoned big idea. Perhaps the ambivalence, if not aversion, that people seem to feel toward the elevator derives from a sense that it isn’t as fabulous as it should be, near-perfect though it already is.

At a certain point, Nicholas White ran out of ideas. Anger and vindictiveness took root. He began to think, They, whoever they were, shouldn’t be able to get away with this, that he deserved some compensation for the ordeal. He cast about for blame. He wondered where his colleague was, why she hadn’t been alarmed enough by his failure to return, jacketless, from smoking a cigarette to call security. Whose fault is this? he wondered. Who’s going to pay? He decided that there was no way he was going to work the following week.

And then he gave up. The time passed in a kind of degraded fever dream. On the videotape, he lies motionless for hours at a time, face down on the floor.

A voice woke him up: “Is there someone in there?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing in there?”

White tried to explain; the voice in the intercom seemed to assume that he was an intruder. “Get me the fuck out of here!” White shrieked. Duly persuaded, the guard asked him if he wanted anything. White, who had been planning to join a few friends at a bar on Friday evening, asked for a beer.

Before long, an elevator-maintenance team arrived and, over the intercom, coached him through a set of maneuvers with the buttons. White asked what day it was, and, when they told him it was Sunday at 4 P.M., he was shocked. He had been trapped for forty-one hours. He felt a change in the breeze, which suggested that the elevator was moving. When he felt it slow again, he wrenched the door open, and there was the lobby. In his memory, he had to climb up onto the landing, but the video does not corroborate this. When he emerged from the elevator, he saw his friends, with a couple of security guards, and a maintenance man, waiting, with an empty chair. His friends turned to see him and were appalled at the sight; he looked like a ghost, one of them said later. The security guard handed him an open Heineken. He took one sip but found the beer repellent, like Hans Castorp with his Maria Mancini cigar. White told a guard, “Somebody could’ve died in there.”

“I know,” the guard said.

White had to go upstairs to get his jacket. He demanded that the guards come with him, and so they rode together on the service elevator, with the elevator operator. The presence of others with radios put him at ease. In his office he found that his co-worker, in a fit of pique over his disappearance, had written an angry screed, and taped it to his computer screen, for all their colleagues to see. He went home, and then headed to a bar. He woke up to a reel of phone messages and a horde of reporters colonizing his stoop. He barely left his apartment in the ensuing days, deputizing his friends to talk to reporters through a crack in the door.

White never went back to work at the magazine. Caught up in media attention (which he shunned but thrilled to), prodded by friends, and perhaps provoked by overly solicitous overtures from McGraw-Hill, White fell under the sway of renown and grievance, and then that of the legal establishment. He got a lawyer, and came to believe that returning to work might signal a degree of mental fitness detrimental to litigation. Instead, he spent eight weeks in Anguilla. Eventually, Business Week had to let him go. The lawsuit he filed, for twenty-five million dollars, against the building’s management and the elevator-maintenance company, took four years. They settled for an amount that White is not allowed to disclose, but he will not contest that it was a low number, hardly six figures. He never learned why the elevator stopped; there was talk of a power dip, but nothing definite. Meanwhile, White no longer had his job, which he’d held for fifteen years, and lost all contact with his former colleagues. He lost his apartment, spent all his money, and searched, mostly in vain, for paying work. He is currently unemployed.

Looking back on the experience now, with a peculiarly melancholic kind of bewilderment, he recognizes that he walked onto an elevator one night, with his life in one kind of shape, and emerged from it with his life in another. Still, he now sees that it wasn’t so much the elevator that changed him as his reaction to it. He has come to terms with the trauma of the experience but not with his decision to pursue a lawsuit instead of returning to work. If anything, it prolonged the entrapment. He won’t blame the elevator. ♦

A Compilation of painful and funny crashes with motorbikes.

2008-04-08T21:46:00.000-07:00

Car Crash Compilation

2008-03-15T08:19:00.000-07:00