Jim McNally lives 77 storeys above Yonge St. Through his floor-to-ceiling windows he looks down on Queen’s Park and the University of Toronto, and on a clear day he can spot distant planes on the tarmac at Pearson. The family physician says he put “all his marbles” into the condominium and much prefers the downtown locale to an alternative in the suburbs.

But life at such great heights hasn’t been so great lately.

It’s the elevators.

McNally doesn’t trust them.

There have been periodic problems since he moved in about a year and a half ago, McNally told the Star in an interview, but since a powerful rainstorm hit Toronto last Monday, the lifts’ lack of lifting has hit a new low. Of the nine elevators that serve the 79 floors of the Aura tower at Yonge and Gerrard Sts.—a building with billboards that boast: “Canada’s Tallest Condominium”—three have been broken for more than eight days, said McNally, who sits on the condo board.

For those like him that live above the 55th storey, only one elevator works—sort of. As of Tuesday afternoon, it was manned by a kindly security guard on a stool, who would pilot the elevator to the requested floor, stopping at every fifth storey on the way down to pick up any departing residents. If you want to go down, you can call the concierge and ask for the lift to be sent to your floor, or you can take the stairs to one of the storeys where the elevator is scheduled to stop.

“It’s like the ‘20s,” said McNally, provoking a laugh from the guard-turned-elevator attendant on Tuesday. “What happens when people are trapped and there’s an actual emergency?”

It’s a question that many were asking outside the Aura building, even while some grumbled about the inconvenience of the downed elevators. Many of them said the elevators conk out regularly. Last year, for instance, one of them was broken for about a month, McNally said.

Jodi Hynes of the Otis Elevator Company, which manufactured and maintains the lifts, said in an emailed statement that the damage was due to a pipe burst that affected six elevators. Three of those are now fixed, but the ones still out of service still require “extensive repairs to key critical components,” Hynes said.

She added that her company is waiting on approval from Aura management, which is run by Brookfield Condominium Services, to make those repairs. “There is nothing more important to Otis than the safety of the people who count on our products and services every day,” she said.

Condo management did not return several calls from the Star on Tuesday.

A recent investigation by The Canadian Press reported an “elevator crisis” in the country, with faulty lifts trapping passengers and inconveniencing tower residents more and more frequently. Last year in Ontario, for instance, firefighters responded to 4,461 calls to get people out of broken down elevators.

The report pointed to a 10 per cent rise in the number of elevators in Ontario over the past five years, as well as aging equipment and structural issues, as potential causes for the glut of lift problems.

But elevators or not, a study published in January found that people who go into cardiac arrest above the 25th storey have a “negligible” chance of surviving—less than 1 per cent. The study noted that survival rates drop by 7 to 10 per cent for every one minute delay to defibrillation.

Sophie Carroll, a 24-year-old who uses a walker, said she lives on the fifth floor of the Aura building in Toronto. She said that last Monday morning, there was an announcement over the building speaker system that “all the elevators” were down because of flooding. The three elevators to her portion of the tower—the lower third—were all online in a matter of hours, but there have been problems before, she said.

“It’s a little outrageous, and I’ve been debating moving,” she said. “It’s just too big a building. They haven’t accommodated.”

Pawlu Saliba rode by on a bike after delivering hotdogs and a milkshake to the 33rd floor. He agreed with Carroll that the building is too big to handle so many broken elevators. “It’s a hassle,” he said. “They should have put 12 elevators in there.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

McNally said he has been told that the flooding damaged the circuit of some of the elevators. The solution, he suggested, would be to make them waterproof. He added that he’d like to see better maintenance, not just so he can more conveniently ascent to his abode in the sky.

“Quite often one of them’s broken,” he said. “It’s more of a safety issue.”