You don’t need to see the horror movie “Devil” to experience the terror of being stuck in an elevator. Just board some of the worst elevators in the subway system.
A?1-year-old elevator at Gun Hill Road has trapped people seven times this year, the MTA’s annual report of elevator and escalator performance states.
Elevators at 191st Street on the 1 line have trapped people six times this year.
Sandi Galawanji and her husband were trapped in an elevator for three hours this past spring at the 181st Street A station. The 23-year-old elevator, the oldest in the system, halted a few stories from the street level at about 8 p.m.; they didn’t get out after 11 p.m.
“We just stopped and my heart dropped,” recalled Galawanji, 62. She pressed the emergency “help” button and spoke to an MTA employee, but had to wait hours to be rescued from an elevator that was, in her words, “the urinal of the neighborhood.”
“It was really scary,” she said. “I was nauseous, I had heart palpitations.”
“It was such a lousy screwup. They never got back to see if I was dead or alive. It was like it never happened.”
The MTA had no record matching Galawanji’s ordeal but did record a 20-minute entrapment around the same time.
Free at last
Galawanji was finally able to escape after MTA workers opened a 2-by-1-foot escape hatch at the top of the elevator. “Nobody even bothered to call EMS,” she complained.
