Close call for pair in flooded Toronto elevator
TORONTO • Gasping for air as the murky flood waters threatened to engulf him inside a Toronto elevator, Klever Freire could think only of his 13-year-old daughter.
Freire, the CEO of DreamQuii, a tech startup that develops drones, was working late on Tuesday. He was supposed to pick up his daughter to go to a movie, but at 10 p.m., he found himself in his office at a commercial building in northwest Toronto.
A torrential downpour had already begun to flood the city’s streets when Freire and Gabriel Otrin, an industrial engineer at DreamQuii, heard the building’s parking garage was flooding, and they raced down to save Freire’s Honda CR-V. Before their elevator could reach the basement, flood waters began to pour in.
First their feet disappeared, then their knees. In four minutes, Freire said, the two men were up to their waists in water — and it was still rising.
“It started gushing in right away,” Freire said. “To know that the elevator was going to fill up entirely, when we got that realization, that was probably the scariest moment.”
When Freire and Otrin realized they were trapped they screamed, hoping their co-workers could hear. The elevator stalled and the two engineers couldn’t ride it back up. They couldn’t use the elevator’s speakers to call for help either because the system was already covered in water. Within an elevator and below the ground, Otrin’s cellphone had no cell service.
With water levels continuing to rise, they stood on the elevator’s hand rails and pounded on the ceiling panels. They couldn’t use the emergency hatch above their heads to escape because it could only be opened from outside. Otrin’s hands were sliced open as the pair ripped open a 10-centimetre crack in the panels. It was just enough to squeeze Otrin’s phone through and call police.
Panic set in as they waited for rescue. Under the flickering lights, Freire and Otrin talked about how they might not make it out alive. Then they made a pact.
“There was panic, there was praying, there was deciding we were going to get out of there no matter what,” Freire said.
Less than five minutes away, Toronto police constables Ryan Barnett and Josh McSweeney were in a cruiser filling out paperwork when they took the call. Within six minutes, the officers arrived at the building. On the ground floor, four men were trying to pry open the elevator doors with a two-by-four, according to the building’s owner, Elliot Strashin.
Barnett and McSweeney quickly decided that prying open the elevator door from the basement was more time-efficient that trying to bring Freire and Otrin out through the emergency hatch. Only two inches of the door’s frame weren’t submerged in water when they stripped off their vests and gun belts and jumped in.
“We could hear them inside screaming for help and saying that the water was getting too high and they needed us,” Barnett said at a press conference Wednesday.
McSweeney rushed back to the ground floor and grabbed a crowbar — but it was too long and the two couldn’t get enough leverage to open the door. So McSweeney ran upstairs again to retrieve a shorter one. By the time he had returned, the water levels had risen more than six inches.
“We’re now treading water because we can’t touch the ground,” McSweeney said.
Finally, using the shorter crowbar, the officers were able to pry the door open. Water immediately filled the remaining pocket of air that Freire and Otrin were using to survive. The two engineers jumped out and while Otrin was able to swim to the staircase on his own, Freire, who trained as a lifeguard when he was younger, needed Barnett’s help.
“Once we knew we’d be OK, I gave myself the freedom to relax for a bit and forget how to swim,” Freire said.
For their efforts, Barnett and McSweeney have been dubbed heroes on social media. “It feels good,” Barnett said. “I was very excited and happy and you get to save a couple of people’s lives — that’s what we do this job for.”
Environment Canada had issued a special weather statement for the city, saying between 50 and 100 millimetres of rain was expected in some locations, particularly near the lakeshore. The agency said more than 64 millimetres of rain had fallen at Billy Bishop Airport just south of the downtown core in only two hours.
Soaking wet, Freire and Otrin were led out of the basement by McSweeney and Barnett. The two engineers were still shaken up when a Russian woman who works in the building offered them a shot of vodka. They took it and waited for their families to pick them up. When Freire’s family arrived, one of his colleagues asked if he wanted to take the elevator down to the main floor.
“I’ll take the stairs,” Freire said.