In previous work, the hazards associated with elevator door closures were identified and analyzed.\[1\] Using the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) database, incidents associated with door strikes were identified between the years 1990 to 2017. The data showed a steady decline in overall incidents with a noted decline in incidents involving arm injuries. The data also showed that children under the age of five years represented the high-risk group for elevator door strikes.

This current effort focuses on evaluating elevator tripping hazards. The ASME A17.1 *Safety Code for Elevators and Escalators* establishes safe practices in the design, construction, installation, operation, testing, inspection, and maintenance of elevators. The ASME A17.1 Code requires that elevator systems be equipped with leveling devices to vertically align the car platform sill relative to the hoistway landing sill to attain a predetermined accuracy. Even with the leveling safety requirements contained in the Code, tripping incidents for passengers exiting or entering elevators are known to occur.

This paper will focus on identifying and defining elevator tripping hazards and will review the NEISS database to better understand the trends. An analysis of the NEISS elevator incidents from the years 1990 to 2018 will be performed using the methodology developed in two previous works investigating escalator sidewall entrapment and one previous work investigating elevator door strikes. Publicly available NEISS data from 1997 through 2018 will be used in conjunction with a statistically rebalanced NEISS data set from 1990 through 1996 that accounts for changes in the NEISS sampling frame that occurred between these two time periods. Elevator tripping incidents will be extracted from these data sets through a combination of computer-aided parsing and manual inspection of the text-based descriptions fields of all elevator-related incident records found in the NEISS data set from this time period. National projections of elevator tripping incidents will then be calculated from this extracted data set and trended for the entire time period of 1990 through 2018.

These data projection and trends will be  explored and the safety control features currently available to address these tripping hazards in ASME A17.1 Code will be discussed. The ASME A17.1 Code requirements to mitigate the hazards of tripping when entering or exiting an elevator will also be compared to other trip hazard related regulations found, for example, in ASTM standards for walking/working surfaces, building codes and Americans with Disabilities (ASA) Standards for Accessible Design requirements.


Assessment of Elevator Risks and Code Requirements Associated With Slip, Trip and Fall Hazards

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

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