Broken elevator leaves woman stranded

96-year-old hasn’t been able to leave third-floor apartment in weeks

In 1987, Mollie Ewig retired from her 30-year career as an executive secretary and left Brooklyn with her husband to retire in South Florida. They bought a condo in the Sunrise Lakes condominium complex — a city-like sprawl of 93 pastel-colored buildings that houses hundreds of residents aged 55 and over.

Ewig, who has relied on a wheelchair since being diagnosed with Polio as child, has never been fond of idleness. Right away, she became secretary of a nearby women’s club. After noticing many residents in the community lived alone and didn’t get outside much, she founded a singing troupe to put on shows for them.

But Ewig hasn’t been able to go to any practices lately. In fact, as a result of an ongoing elevator issue in her building with little signs of resolving, the sprightly 96-year-old hasn’t been able to leave her third-floor apartment for three weeks.

“I am prisoner in my own home,” Ewig said, her face crumpled into a frown.

The door to the elevator in question was covered in a notice Tuesday that said there was an “electrical problem” that the association, an electrician and an elevator service company were attempting to resolve.

When Ewig hasn’t been knit

ting or listening to audio books to pass her time, she has spent her days calling and speaking to various members of the association to get an answer about the problem.

Her one surviving daughter in New Jersey and her daughter-in-law in California have done the same. A neighbor who lives on the first floor, has tried, too — even going as far as to write county commissioners.

All of them have heard different timetables for when the issue might be resolved.

Ewig said the latest she had heard was that the fix could take as long as three months. She is a patient person, but even she has a breaking point. “How patient can you be?” she asked.

In the three weeks she has remained at home, Ewig has canceled all of her doctor’s appointments.

She has an eye disease that leads to blurred vision and she’s supposed to get injections in her eye. Her next door neighbor, Anne Hogan, 74, who uses a walker and has also been unable to leave her apartment, has canceled appointments with her gastroenterologist, her psychiatrist, and her primary doctor.

“They are not little appointments,” Hogan said.

Ewig said the association told her to consider renting an apartment on the first floor until the elevator is fixed.

But she has lived in her apartment in Sunrise for 32 years and has spent money widening the doorways, replacing the bathtub and upgrading her kitchen in order to make every space accessible to her motorized scooter. “It’s not easy for me to just go from one apartment to another,” she said.

Both Ewig and Hogan said they have been the only two voices complaining about the elevator. Although the building serves seniors, they said many are able to walk up and down the stairs. Ewig said many neighbors also are snowbirds who aren’t around to begin with.

“Maybe it’s not important enough to them,” Ewig said of the condo association’s failure to resolve the issue. “We are the only people that need the elevator most, I guess.”

Peggy Talerico, property manager for Ewig’s building, said that could not be further from the truth. “It’s not as if we are ignoring the problem,” she said. “We are trying to fix it.”

For the past three weeks

Talerico said she has had elevator repairmen out to the property and has gotten the elevator to work for a day or two on a handful of occasions before it broke again for reasons that she, the repairmen and FPL can’t seem to figure out. “It’s been like finding a needle in a haystack.”

Talerico said she never told Ewig that the elevator would be down for three months, or that she should move to a first-floor apartment. She said she recently signed a contract to modernize the 40-year-old elevator that will cost close to

$80,000. She said she hopes the upgrades will fix the issue for good, but she did say that it likely will take another 30 days to complete.

“I get that she feels trapped,” Talerico said, speaking about Ewig, who she feels sympathy for. However, Talerico does not believe Ewig is painting the situation in a fair light. “This is not a situation where the association has ignored the residents.”

Tim Mowrey, whose elevator repair company has been servicing the elevator, agreed.

He said his company has replaced the elevator motor and starter three times.

All three times, they functioned for a day or two before burning out. Usually, that would happen only as a result of a lightning strike, a storm, or brownouts. “It’s unheard of for a brand-new motor to burn up without those other factors being present,” Mowrey said.

Mowrey said he is aware of the pending upgrades to the elevator, but isn’t sure they will solve the problem. According to him, the issue relates to the electrical side of things, which he said only FPL could address.

An FPL spokesman said Wednesday that after researching the issue over the past week, the company has determined that the transformers for the building must be replaced to provide the proper voltage to the elevator. The spokesman said to replace the transformers, they will have to schedule a planned outage for the entire building for up to eight hours. FPL is working with the property managers to determine that date.

Talerico said she hopes it will be as soon as next week. “I want this fixed more than anyone wants this fixed,” she said. “If it were my mother or grandmother, I would be as upset as everyone else.”

But in the meantime, Ewig is left hanging in the balance. Aside from a woman who comes by in the mornings to help her shower and dress, and Hogan, she has little interaction — something she misses.

On a normal day, Ewig said she would be spanking people in the community at mahjong or rummy cube in the nearby clubhouse, visiting friends or practicing with her singing troupe. “I just like being out and being social,” she said.

Jeff Johnson, director of the Florida AARP chapter, said social activity is vital for elderly men and women. Isolation is a problem for seniors, he said, and it is a particular problem in Florida, where there are over 6 million seniors over the age of 70.

According to Johnson, many seniors in the state, like Ewig and Hogan, live alone after retiring from other states, leaving behind the communities they grew up in, and raised children in, to enter communities that are empty for many months out of the year. “In Florida, it is very easy to be left with no one to look after you,” Johnson said.

Ewig said she relies greatly on her active social life, but she would not get too down on herself.

At one point, she gestured to the pink walls of her apartment, filled with photographs of her life that has included as much heartbreak as it has beauty. Ewig has lost her husband, two of her children and two grandchildren. She has beaten cancer and lived through open-heart surgery. Although her active life has been disrupted, she said she was pretty sure she would get through this, too.

“I just want the elevator to be fixed,” she said. “Then I could go on with my life.”

TAIMY ALVAREZ/SUN SENTINEL Mollie Ewig has lived in her apartment in Sunrise Lakes for 32 years. It has been outfitted to accommodate her motorized wheelchair.

TAIMY ALVAREZ/SUN SENTINEL Mollie Ewig, 96, in the bedroom of her apartment, which was modified for her to be able to get around easily with her motor scooter. Ewig lives an active lifestyle involved with different activities in her retirement community. But ever since the elevator in her building broke three weeks ago, Ewing says the situation has disrupted her entire life.