There’s only so much NYCHA elevators can lift.
Firefighters punched through the wall of an East Harlem housing project building Sunday to rescue a heavyset man stuck inside an elevator along with a bulky washing machine, neighbors and authorities said.
The man was riding an elevator in one of the East River Houses buildings on E. 105th St. and FDR Drive at about 4:15 p.m. when, workers told the Daily News, the overloaded elevator stopped cold between the first and second floors.
Why the man was traveling with a washing machine was unclear Sunday night.
From her first floor apartment, Asheley Haywood heard someone pushing the elevator’s emergency button.
“They were pushing the button for like 10 minutes. I was like, ‘Oh s---, somebody’s stuck in the elevator.’ I went and saw they were stuck between the first and second floor. I called but they couldn’t get them out for like two hours.”
The elevator only serviced floors six through 10 of the building, so firefighters had no doors to open to try and rescue the man.
So they cut a square-shaped hole through a wall on the second floor and pulled him out that way.
He refused medical attention, an FDNY spokesman said.
Haywood said she had heard the man’s father was also riding in the elevator, and was rescued through the roof hatch, but the FDNY spokesman couldn’t confirm that Sunday night.
New York City Housing Authority representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
NYCHA responded to about 28,400 elevator service outages between January and August of this year, an agency executive told the City Council in September.
City public housing buildings are served by more than 3,200 elevators that make 3.2 million trips a day. An average elevator outage lasts about 10 hours.
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