Three paramedics and a seriously ill patient were trapped in a malfunctioning elevator for close to half an hour in a West Vancouver apartment tower last July after a worn elevator door derailed from its track, delaying emergency hospital transport.
According to a report released by Technical Safety BC, the BC Emergency Health Services members responded to a medical call at the 18-storey residential building on July 21, 2025, where a 14th-floor resident was experiencing a severe medical emergency requiring immediate hospital treatment. When they attempted to bring the patient down to their waiting ambulance on a stretcher, the elevator door jammed and would not reopen, trapping all four occupants inside the car.
The elevator eventually descended on its own, stopping briefly at the 12th, 11th, and 10th floors before opening in the lobby. West Vancouver Fire Department crews used the jaws of life to pry open the doors and free the occupants just over 25 minutes after they became trapped. The patient was then transported to the hospital under lights and sirens.
The incident is documented in a safety report that traces the entrapment to a combination of worn mechanical components, deferred maintenance, and decisions made under pressure during the emergency.
The building, constructed in 1968, has two passenger elevators. At the time of the incident, one had been offline for nearly two years while undergoing a major upgrade — a project plagued by delays that left the building’s 18 floors dependent on a single elevator. In the two months before the entrapment, that elevator broke down six times, each time requiring a technician callout to restore service.
At the heart of the mechanical failure were small adjustable rollers inside the elevator door mechanism. These “upthrust rollers” are designed to keep the door panel on its track and should be set with a gap of roughly 1/16 inch. An elevator technician told investigators the rollers on this elevator had been worn to the point where they could no longer be adjusted to maintain the required clearance — yet the door was left in service.
A maintenance inspection conducted in April 2025, just three months before the incident, signed off on the door’s hangers, tracks, rollers and related components. The next scheduled inspection of those same components was due in July 2025 and had not yet taken place when the emergency occurred.
When paramedics loaded the patient and stretcher into the 14th-floor elevator, the door’s light sensor was repeatedly blocked by crew members and equipment. The door attempted to close four times. On the third attempt, two paramedics pushed back against the upper portion of the door to prevent it from closing on them. That force — applied to the top of an already-worn door — was enough to knock the door off its track.
A paramedic then manually forced the partially jammed door to the closed position. With the door shut, the hall interlock latched and neither door could be reopened. The occupants were trapped.
The report identifies three contributing factors. First, the worn door components were not flagged during recent maintenance inspections, leaving the mechanism susceptible to failure under conditions that could reasonably be expected during normal use. Second, the prolonged outage of the second elevator created intense demand on the only working car, likely influencing maintenance and repair decisions aimed at minimizing downtime. Third, the elevator was operating in its standard automatic mode rather than “independent mode,” a keyed setting that would have stopped the door from repeatedly attempting to close and would have given paramedics direct control over door operation.
The building manager held a key for independent mode and told investigators they would have provided it to emergency responders if asked. The report notes that had paramedics been given that key before entering the elevator with their patient, the sequence of events that led to the entrapment likely would not have occurred.
The BCEHS members inside the elevator were unable to reach dispatch by radio due to no signal in the building. One paramedic used a personal cell phone to contact dispatch and alert the receiving hospital to the delay.
