Stuck right now?
Press the alarm button and hold it for a few seconds. Move to the back of the car, away from the doors. Then wait. Don’t try to force the doors or climb out, and don’t jump or rock the car. Someone is coming.
The lift stops somewhere between floors, the doors stay shut, and after a few seconds of waiting for it to sort itself out you realise it isn’t going to.
Most people press every button on the panel at that point. It does no harm, but it doesn’t achieve much either. A lift stops because a sensor has told it to, and it won’t move again until somebody has worked out why.
What follows covers the wait itself, and then the part that matters more if you’re responsible for a building: how a release actually works, and who is allowed to carry one out.
What to Do If You're Stuck in a Lift
- Press the alarm and hold it
- Try the intercom or a posted number if nobody answers
- Move to the back of the car
- Say who's in the lift
- Save your phone battery
Press the alarm and hold it
It’s the yellow button, usually marked with a bell. Hold it down for several seconds rather than tapping it, since some systems only register the call once the button has been held.
What happens next depends on the installation. On most modern lifts the alarm dials out to a monitoring centre or to the maintenance provider, and a two-way speaker in the car lets whoever answers talk to you. On older lifts it may only ring a bell in the building. Either way, expect a pause before anyone speaks.
When someone answers, give them the building address, which lift you’re in, and your best guess at the floor. Don’t assume anyone outside has already noticed. A lift stopped between floors with its doors shut looks completely normal from the landing.
Try the intercom or a posted number if nobody answers
The alarm bell and the two-way speaker aren’t always the same system. On older installations the bell can ring somewhere nobody is sitting, particularly out of hours.
Look for a notice in the car. Most carry the maintenance provider’s number and a unit number, and that unit number is how they identify which lift in which building you’re in. If there’s no notice, ring whoever manages the building. And if none of that gets you anywhere, calling 999 is perfectly reasonable. The fire service attends lift entrapments.
Move to the back of the car
Stand or sit towards the back, away from the doors. The car can shift slightly while the engineer works, and the doors may open with less warning than you’d expect. If it looks like being a long wait, sit down, and don’t lean on the doors while you do. They’re panels on rollers, not a wall.
Say who's in the lift
If anyone is unwell, pregnant, on their own with a child, a wheelchair user, or badly frightened, mention it when the alarm is answered. It changes how the call is prioritised and sometimes whether the emergency services are called alongside the engineer. Say how many of you there are too, since a full car in July is a different situation from one person on a cool morning.
Save your phone battery
A lift shaft is a poor place for a signal, and a phone that can’t find one will flatten itself hunting for one. Put it on low power, turn the torch off, and keep what’s left for the call that matters. You shouldn’t be sitting in the dark anyway, since lift cars have emergency lighting running off its own battery.
What Not to Do
- Don't try to prise the doors open
- Don't climb out through the ceiling hatch
- Don't jump, rock or bang the car
- Don't keep pressing the buttons
- Don't worry about the lift falling
- Don't worry about the air
Don't try to prise the doors open
There are two sets of doors, the ones on the car and the ones on each landing, and they’re interlocked so that the car doors can only open when the car is level with a floor. If the lift has stopped between floors and you force them, what’s on the other side isn’t a corridor. It’s the shaft wall, or a gap.
The scenario that kills people is squeezing through a partly open door while the car is out of position. A lift that has been sitting still can move the moment an engineer starts work on it, and anyone half in and half out at that point has no way of getting clear.
Don't climb out through the ceiling hatch
The hatch is there so engineers can reach the top of the car from outside the lift, and on most installations it’s secured from that side anyway. The top of the car isn’t a safe place to be either: there’s running gear up there, a counterweight moving somewhere in the shaft, and very little light.
Don't jump, rock or bang the car
It won’t shake the lift back into life and it can make things worse. Lifts carry safety gear that grips the guide rails if the car moves in a way it shouldn’t, and setting that off means the car is clamped until an engineer releases it by hand. A ten-minute wait becomes an hour.
Don't keep pressing the buttons
Understandable, and useless. Once a lift has taken itself out of service it stays there until the fault is cleared, and no combination of floor buttons will override that. The alarm is the only button on the panel doing anything for you.
Don't worry about the lift falling
A traction lift hangs on several steel ropes, each one rated to carry the full weight of a loaded car on its own. Underneath sits the safety gear, a set of wedges that clamp onto the guide rails if the car ever travels faster than it should, triggered mechanically by an overspeed governor so it works with the power off. A lift that has stopped between floors has almost always done so because a sensor took the car out of service deliberately.
Don't worry about the air
Lift cars aren’t sealed. There are gaps around the doors, vents in the car, and a large open shaft around the whole thing. It can get warm and stuffy, particularly in summer, which is uncomfortable rather than a safety problem.
How Long Will It Take?
Most releases are finished inside an hour, though it depends on where the engineer is travelling from and what stopped the lift. The sequence is fairly standard.
- The alarm reaches a manned point, either the maintenance provider or a monitoring centre
- An engineer is dispatched, usually keeping contact with the car on the speaker
- On arrival they isolate the lift so it cannot move
- The car is wound by hand to the nearest landing and the brake released so it settles level
- The doors are opened with the landing key and passengers step out onto a floor
The ceiling hatch and the ladder in the shaft belong to films rather than to ordinary releases.
If You Manage the Building: What Not to Do
Don't let untrained staff open the lift
Most guides stop at telling passengers not to prise the doors open. The same rule applies to your own staff, and that version carries liability with it.
LEIA guidance
Releases should be carried out by a trained lift engineer or the emergency services. For gearless machines, lifts with bi-directional safety gears and machine-room-less lifts, that recommendation is stronger again.
Where non-lift personnel do carry out releases, the conditions are narrow. They need training to BS 7255 and to the lift manufacturer’s instructions, and they need to be able to demonstrate competence rather than simply hold a certificate. Releases are limited to the door unlocking zone, which is 200mm above or below the door opening, so if the car isn’t sitting within that zone they stop. They also stop if the equipment behaves unexpectedly, and they’re expected to decline the job altogether if they can’t remember the procedure in full.
LEIA is equally clear about the building owner’s side of it. Untrained people shouldn’t be carrying out releases, and you need to confirm that your liability insurance covers the activity before anyone attempts one. There should be a risk assessment behind it, covering site conditions, access to the machinery, the hazards involved and how the person carrying out the release stays in contact with somebody else.
For most commercial buildings, releases sit with the maintenance contract. Having trained staff on site is a legitimate alternative, but it involves training records, insurance cover and a risk assessment rather than a key kept in a drawer.
Don't put the lift straight back into service
An entrapment is a symptom of something, and the lift will do it again until the cause is found. Keep it out of use until the engineer has identified the fault and confirmed it’s safe to run.
Record the details while they’re fresh: the date, the time the alarm came in, the time everyone was released, who was in the car, and what the engineer found. Insurers ask for that record, and in more serious cases so does the HSE.
It’s worth checking on the passengers afterwards too. People are often more shaken than they appear at the time.
Then look at the history rather than the one incident. A lift that traps people several times in a year has a fault that maintenance hasn’t resolved, and it’s fair to ask your provider what they’ve diagnosed rather than what they’ve reset. Recurring entrapments are also one of the clearer signs that a lift is reaching the point where modernisation costs less than carrying on with repairs.
If You Manage the Building: What to Do
Ring your provider and call it an entrapment
Use their emergency number, and say entrapment rather than breakdown. That normally changes both the priority and who gets sent.
Keep talking to the car
Establish contact and keep it going. A lot of the distress in an entrapment comes from not knowing whether anyone is aware of the problem.
While you’re talking, find out who’s in there. A passenger who is unwell, pregnant, alone with a child or seriously distressed turns a wait into an emergency call. Stop anyone calling the lift from the landings while you’re at it.
Know when to call 999
Call 999 if
There is a medical problem, fire or smoke is involved, or the engineer is a long way out and the situation is getting worse.
Check that the alarm reaches somebody
This one is for a quiet afternoon rather than during an entrapment, but it is the single most useful thing on this page. All the advice about pressing the alarm button assumes the button connects to a person, and that assumption is wrong more often than people expect.
BS EN 81-28 covers remote alarms on passenger lifts. It asks for four things.
- Two-way voice communication, so the passenger can speak and be spoken to rather than just setting off a bell
- A call that reaches a point which is actually attended, not a line ringing in an office that empties at five
- Automatic self-testing at least every three days, covering speaker, microphone and battery, with records kept
- Battery backup of an hour on standby and fifteen minutes of talk time, so it still works during a power cut
Buildings that have moved from analogue phone lines to digital are worth a check. Some lift autodiallers that worked on the old network don’t work on the new one, and the failure isn’t announced.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. A traction lift hangs on several steel ropes, each rated to hold the full load on its own, and the safety gear clamps onto the guide rails mechanically if the car ever overspeeds. A lift that has stopped between floors has stopped on purpose.
Usually under an hour. It depends on how far the engineer has to travel and what caused the stop, and pressing the alarm is what starts that process.
No. Lift cars aren’t sealed, and there are gaps around the doors as well as vents in the car. It may get warm and stuffy, particularly in summer.
Only if they’re trained to BS 7255 and to the manufacturer’s instructions, can demonstrate competence, and the car is within the 200mm door unlocking zone. LEIA’s guidance is that releases should be left to a trained lift engineer or the emergency services, and the building owner has to confirm liability insurance covers it.
Call your lift maintenance provider first. Call 999 if someone needs medical help, if fire or smoke is involved, or if nobody can reach the lift within a reasonable timeframe and the situation is deteriorating.
Find the cause rather than resetting the lift. Repeated entrapments on the same lift point either to a fault that maintenance hasn’t resolved or to a lift old enough that modernisation is the better option.
Lift keeps trapping people?
If a lift in your building keeps trapping people, or you aren’t sure the alarm connects to anyone, our engineers cover the North West 24 hours a day.
