Lift cable snaps in London's Tower Bridge.

Tower Bridge London

A cable has snapped in a lift on the North of tower bridge, People have been taken to hospital with Broken legs, 3 are known to have been rushed to hospital and 4 walked away,

City of London Police said the alert was raised at around 1.15pm.

Three ambulance crews and a hazardous area response team were immediately dispatched.

The bridge has been closed to traffic.

The capital's iconic bridge is currently undergoing a three-year restoration programme of painting and stone cleaning

link


[edit on 11-5-2009 by asala]

10 people are still trapped in the north tower,

Just getting word that the 10 people who where trapped have now been freed from the lift,

goodness how scary! I hate lifts at the best of times and this would be my worse nightmare,

WOW! That's pretty bad... I've had reason to have a good look at some modern lift machinery, had to manually lower a lift to the next floor after some thing tripped the safety and stuff like that.

I thought these things were pretty much fail safe - if the cables (plural) do snap there are at least 2 other mechanisms that wont let you fall more than a few feet.

In fact off the top of my head I can only think of one other lift failure - and that was in the Empire State building when a WW2 bomber flew into the building and - well severed the cables I suppose.

Must be some rickety old workers lift - I'm confident a modern one would not fail - I hope! I don't want to have to avoid lifts.

Yep that's what shocked me about it, I really thought that all lifts had to be up to a certain standard, And you would think Tower bridge of all places would have been top priority due to the amount of tourists,

Odd indeed,

I thought they had fail safes in the lift where brakes automatically act in these circumstances.
That would have to be a nightmare to experiences, falling like that with the anticipation of the inevitable impact. I hope they are all OK.

reply to post by Now_Then


Ok, the fail safes, umm, failed.

City police said health and safety officials were sent to the scene. One police source added: “It is extremely lucky people were not more seriously injured, or even killed. The question is why the lift's fail-safe device failed to work.”

www.thisislondon.co.uk...

Wonder who was running the bridge.

Wow that is really scary. I hate lifts.....this is a total nightmare scenario. Something tells me these people will take the stairs in future.

It was tourists - I some how had it in my mind some work was being done on the bridge and this was workers who were hurt...

I think we may see a couple of heads on spikes for the first time in hundreds of years.

Originally posted by asala
Yep that's what shocked me about it, I really thought that all lifts had to be up to a certain standard, And you would think Tower bridge of all places would have been top priority due to the amount of tourists,

Odd indeed,

My thoughts exactly!

Can't believe somewhere so well known and popular wouldn't have regular checks on soemthing as well used as a lift.

There lucky nobody died, hopefully it will encourage them to do more safety checks from now.

One of the problems with fail safes is that they are very hard to test - ie, you need to break the lift in order to test if the fail safes work.... ejector seats in aircraft suffer from the same reliability issue...

i think it's terrible that these people were hurt and all but i've found myself humming "london bridge is falling down" all afternoon, am i a terrible person?

who ever said standards of workmanship and maintainance were dropping?

reply to post by pieman


Not only terrible but WRONG! London bridge is is the next one up stream.... That's tower bridge...

Don't you feel daft now? lol

falling elevators rank right there with derailed rollercoaster on my "crap not to ever do" list.