Elderly highrise residents coping — more or less — to life without an elevator

LACONIA — At Lake Village Apartments, home to 70 mostly-elderly residents, life has been anything but normal since Easter Sunday four weeks ago. That’s when the elevator in the six-story building conked out.

The company that manages the facility wants to get the elevator up and running as soon as possible, but says it expects the outage to last about another two months while a part critical to get the elevator back in service is manufactured.

Meanwhile residents are doing what they can to cope with the situation. For some the outage is mostly an inconvenience that they have adjusted to. But for others, especially those on upper floors, the inability to use the elevator is a hardship.

All declined to give their names for fear of antagonizing the building’s managers.

Ryan Stewart, vice president of Stewart Property Management, said the best estimate of when the elevator will be up and running again is between seven and nine weeks from now.

“We don’t want to give the residents false hopes,” he said regarding the lengthy estimated time to repair the elevator.

On Thursday Stewart said the cause of the outage was a failure of the elevator jack, the hydraulic cylinder that moves the elevator up and down.

The jacks are not the sort of part that elevator manufacturers and repair contractors have in stock and so they need to be custom-made which takes time, Stewart explained.

Stewart Property, based in Bedford, manages 110 affordable housing facilities in northern New England and Massachusetts.

As a stopgap measure the management has installed stair lifts in one of the stairways in the building. The motorized chairs, which ride on rails mounted to the stair treads, allow those who have difficulty climbing stairs to go and from their floors. But since two lifts are required for each story the lifts take much longer.

One resident who would not give her name said it can take as long as 30 minutes to travel six floors.

Laconia Fire Chief Kirk Beatie said the department has worked with the building managers regarding the special arrangements.

He explained that in the event of a medical aid where a resident needed to be transported to the hospital by ambulance the department has special equipment to take a patient down the stairs.

“It’s not as efficient as being able to use an elevator, but it’s a satisfactory arrangement,” he said.

Beattie pointed out that elevators are programmed not to work during building emergencies, meaning in order to evacuate the building residents would always have to use the stairs.

“If the fire alarm goes off, the elevator automatically goes to the first floor and shuts off and no one (except firefighters) can use it until the emergency is over and the fire alarm system has been reset,” he said Wednesday.

A letter to the editor recently published in The Daily Sun was critical about how the situation is being handled.

Selina Edson, of Laconia, who does not live in the building but is good friends with someone who does, said in the letter that the residents of Lake Village Apartments are unsafe.

But Beattie disagreed.

“I don’t see any public danger,” he said.