John Hamilton has lived at a Salem public housing high-rise for seniors and people with disabilities for six years. In that time, he has frequently faced disruptions caused by malfunctioning elevators. Sometimes it lasts just a day or two, but sometimes more than a month.
“I’m in a wheelchair. My legs don’t work,” Hamilton told GBH News before a community meeting at 27 Charter St. organized by the Charter Street Tenant Association. “One [elevator] stopped two feet under the first floor, which meant that I was trapped there. The doors would open, but I couldn’t get out, and then the doors closed and I couldn’t open them.”
Hamilton says residents of the 12-floor building with 110 units — all of whom are elderly or disabled or both — are constantly worried and frustrated about the elevators. At the beginning of May, both of the elevators were broken at the same time, he said, even though they had just undergone a five month-long refurbishment.
“I believe that nobody who lives in this building trusts this elevator system,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton helped organize Thursday’s meeting with city officials, the fire department and the elevator company. That very morning, a GBH News reporter saw a sign on one of the elevators saying it was broken.
George Walsh, who is paraplegic and uses a wheelchair, has lived for 10 years in the building, which sits across the street from the Peabody Essex Museum in downtown Salem.
“If you’re having a heart attack, it’s a problem. They can’t get to you. Or you can’t get down,” he said. “People have medical appointments all the time here.”
Walsh says the problem is getting worse. He says that over Memorial Day Weekend, one of the elevators was broken three out of the four days of the holiday weekend.
Problems with broken elevators in public housing building aren’t unique to Salem. At the end of May, a disabled veteran in Boston was forced to sleep outside after the elevator in his South End complex broke down, and earlier that month the Boston Housing Authority was fined nearly $400,000 for elevator outages in that complex.
At the Salem meeting, Cathy Sheehan, executive director of the Salem Housing Authority said “elevator safety is incredibly important.”
Sheehan’s office provided a document that shows the department spent more than $200,000 over the past year on modernizing and updating the two elevators, meaning even though the elevators themselves are old, the machinery parts are new and are equipped with better safety features.
“If it senses something’s wrong, like power’s gone, it shuts itself off until we can investigate what happened,” said Ed Figueroa, a representative from the Delta Beckwith Elevator Company.
Sheehan said that some of the problems with elevators are due to safety features, which cause the elevator to stop operation in a power outage or if there is an object blocking the door. The provided document blamed the double outage in May on “a neighborhood transformer failure” that resulted in a power surge.
“Trust me when I say we do not want to see the elevators go down, but the reality is, in a building with 12 floors and hundreds and hundreds of people, there’s a lot of use in these elevators,” Sheehan said. “So we are going to see situations where things happen, like vandalism.”
The Salem Housing Authority gets most of its funding through the state Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Sheehan said that objects getting stuck in the tracks and moving companies that force doors to stay open can cause problems. Because of that, they’ve added cameras and changed move-in policies.
However, Walsh said after the meeting that the Housing Authority’s response don’t explain the long outages and the recent problems in May.
“The SHA came in here and did exactly what I thought they would do. They tried to place the blame on the tenants’ activities,” he said. “The issue is the controller and the hardware. And that was apparent by the conversation.”
Other residents, although frustrated by the outages, were glad to see city officials listening and working on the issue.
“I think for the most part, [the meeting] was good, but I think that more needs to come out,” Loveeta Johnson, who lives on the ninth floor, told GBH News after the meeting. “And exactly what that is, I think it’s on both parties’ sides, that need to address it.”
