Family’s fun night out ends in lift ordeal

WHAT was meant to be a fun night out for a family from Roodeplaat, northeast of Pretoria, turned out to be a traumatic three-hour ordeal stuck in a lift at Menlyn Park Mall.

On Friday evening, Ntai Mokoena said he and his partner decided to go out with their two children, aged 5 and 7, to play games at the nearby Menlyn Park mall arcade and grab something to eat.

He said just before 8pm they made their way to the lifts to leave, but instead of going down, the lift went up and stopped working at level P6.

Mokoena said he and two other men who were also stuck in the lift with the family tried to open the doors, but when they couldn’t, they pressed the emergency button for help.

However, he said no one responded to the alarm or communicated with them as they had hoped.

“I ended up calling the number inside the lifts for mall management, but when I eventually got through, the security told me there was no one there to assist us.

“He (the security official) told us they normally had someone from the company responsible for the lifts on standby. They would have to call the technician and he would arrive in 10 minutes.”

Thirty minutes later, Mokoena said, they were still stuck in the lift, and when they called security they were told they were still battling to reach a technician.

“We tried calling the company responsible a number of times, up until the security personnel decided to come down and they opened the lift doors slightly so we could get some fresh air in.”

After two hours, the group decided to contact the local police and Tshwane emergency services to assist them but to no avail.

“When we called emergency services they told us they could come to assist us but they then asked us who would pay for the damage should they come. I was so shocked at how they were more worried about the damage to property than our lives.”

Eventually, he said, the technician arrived. It took another 45 minutes before he managed to open the lift doors to free them.

“It was a truly frustrating and stressful situation. I keep asking myself what would have become of us if I had left my phone in the car or if my battery had died. The children haven’t reacted but were visibly shaken in the lift even though they didn’t want to cry.

“What I don’t understand is why a mall as big as Menlyn, with the number of lifts that they have, don’t have a technician on standby. It just seems like they didn’t care about what happened.”

In what seems like a case of déjà vu in 2017 also around December, a 16-year-old teenager and a friend became stuck in a lift at the mall’s P7 level due to a technical failure.

At the time, the lift`s emergency call button was said to have been dysfunctional, leaving the girls trapped for nearly two hours.

They were allegedly heard screaming for help by shoppers and a technician was called to open the jammed lift.By

yesterday, Nisha Kemraj from Menlyn had referred questions on the incident to Andrea van Schoor, but Van Schoor would only be available today. Emergency services also failed to provide clarity on their failure to respond to the emergency.

“What I don’t understand is why a mall as big as Menlyn Pak mall with the number of lifts they have don’t have a technician on standby

NTAI MOKOENA Menlyn Park Mall shopper