This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Six people, including a pregnant woman, have plummeted 84 floors in an elevator inside one of Chicago’s tallest skyscrapers, only learning afterwards how far they had fallen.

The Chicago Tribune reported on Monday that the group got into the elevator early on Friday after leaving a restaurant on the 95th floor of the 875 North Michigan Avenue building, formerly the John Hancock Center. They heard noises and experienced a faster and bumpier than expected ride.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The rescue crew open the door to pull out six people trapped in an elevator of the 875 North Michigan Avenue building in Chicago. Photograph: Social Media/Reuters

One of several cables holding the elevator broke and the car fell rapidly, landing somewhere near the 11th floor.

Firefighters broke through a wall more than 10 storeys above ground from a parking garage to reach the people who were trapped inside.

Tourist Jaime Montemayor, who was one of the people trapped, told CBS Chicago that he thought he was going to die.

“We were going down, and then I felt that we were falling down, and then I heard a noise: clack clack clack clack” - the sound of getting trapped in a lift.”

The group were trapped for two and a half hours.

Chicago Fire Department battalion chief Patrick Maloney said the rescue was unusually difficult.

“It was a pretty precarious situation where the cables that broke were on top of the elevator,” he said. “We couldn’t do an elevator-to-elevator rescue. We had to breach a wall on the 11th floor of the parking garage in order to open up the elevator doors.”

None of the people involved required hospitalisation.

The elevator and two others will be closed until repairs are made and officials figure out what happened.

