The Scholes Hall elevator has suffered a “catastrophic failure,”
Mary Vosevich, director of the Physical Plant, said the wording on the notice plastered throughout the halls of the administrative office building is not meant to be dramatic.
“That’s just a term that we use for the elevator that cannot be repaired without procuring some other parts that can’t be bought,” she said. “It’s an old elevator so the parts needed are not really off the shelf type of items that you might have with a new elevator. To make the repairs they have to be manufactured.”
Repairs will begin May 17,
Vosevich said. PPD representatives said the elevator could be as much as 74 years old, since it was installed when Scholes Hall was built in 1936.
It is a small inconvenience to have to take the stairs, Natalie Brigance, executive assistant to the vice president of Student Affairs, said.
“Personally I try to not ride it so I am just bee-lining it up the stairs,” she said. “But today I wanted to go for a bike ride and I had to get help to get the bike down the stairs to the main level so I could go ride it. That was kind of an inconvenience. Usually I do ride the elevator when I have my bike with me.”
Kathryn Padilla, a provost administrative assistant, said it has been an issue for some to go to events taking place on Scholes’ upper levels.
“We had a luncheon on the second floor and one of our attendees came over from the Health Sciences Center and he is actually on oxygen and up in age,” she said. “He couldn’t make it up to our meeting because he has a walker and he has oxygen so it was really frustrating for him because he really wanted to attend. It is frustrating for someone not being able to utilize it when they need to.”
The elevator has malfunctioned for years said Selena Salazar, administrative assistant to the Provost.
“Everybody knows it has issues. There has been at least one or two people stuck in it for 30 minutes,” she said. “There was a gentleman that works here who opened the elevator door and he looked down into a black hole because it just wasn’t there.”
The elevator’s jack failed three weeks ago causing the elevator to be shut down, Vosevich said. There wasn’t much the Physical Plant could do except wait.
“The issue with this is that the parts are not readily available,” she said. “Needed parts are being fabricated right now and we are anticipating that we are going to start the repair the Monday after commencement.”
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Padilla said the elevator breaks often and she has experienced the malfunctions herself.
“I got stuck in it once but not for very long, less than five minutes. It was with another employee in the morning right before work,” she said. “It resolved itself fairly quickly but just from the last three and a half years that I’ve been here I can recall at least three separate occasions where someone got stuck in there. That’s at least once a year.”
The building and elevator are old Vosevich said, but UNM does the best it can to maintain all the elevators on campus.
“We have a maintenance contract for the elevators here on campus,” she said. “We have people that are here on our campus everyday but we have probably a couple hundred elevators here. They do preventative maintenance for us, they do repairs for us and we always have access to help.”
