Rescinded order irks elevator industry

TORONTO — A decision by one of Canada’s key elevator-safety authorities to rescind a sweeping three-year-old upgrade directive has sparked both surprise and anger in the industry.

The decision by Ontario’s Technical Standards and Safety Authority, they say, was done without consultation, raises questions about the basis for the far-reaching order in the firstplace, and leaves the public at substantial risk.

“Should I be advising my building owners to act right away on future director’s orders?” Doug Guderian, the CEO of contractor Elevator One, said on Wednesday.

“Maybe you want to wait a few years and see if they rescind this one, too? That doesn’t help the industry in any way to be safer.”

At issue are older “single speed” elevators typically found in lower-rise buildings and which are notorious for posing a tripping or fall hazard by routinely failing to stop level with the floor — sometimes by as much as seven centimetres, a far cry from current accuracy norms of less than a centimetre.

In 2014, the safety authority ordered significant upgrades to every single-speed elevator in Ontario — estimates say there are about 700 to 1,200 of them — and gave owners until the end of 2021 to do so. Data, the authority said at the time, indicated a substantial safety risk related to levelling that was only expected to worsen.

This week, however, TSSA director Roger Neate decided the mandatory upgrade — already carried out in about 55 instances — was no longer necessary.

“TSSA has continued to monitor and review incident, maintenance and inspection order data,” Neate said in the new order.

“The outcome is that the data trends do not support the mandatory upgrade of single-speed elevator-motion controls.”