Elevators in Toulouse: why is it getting stuck?
When you live a few floors above the ground, a simple elevator breakdown can turn everyday life into a real obstacle course. In Toulouse, specialists point out above all the careless use of users.
When Liliane Schweizer’s husband arrives on the sixth floor, where her apartment is located, he is far from suspecting that the cabin doors will not open. “Luckily, he managed to extricate himself, then the elevator broke down” says his wife. The most pending is yet to come. “We immediately alerted the breakdown” detail this 74-year-old retiree who lives in a building on rue de la Gironde, in the Bagatelle district. “Technicians intervened once, but a part was missing. So, they came back, but again, that is not enough to repair the device ”.
For more than three weeks, the elevator will remain like this, motionless. A hassle for Liliane Schweizer and her husband: “We couldn’t do our shopping, because it’s difficult to climb all these floors. We asked our son to help us ”. In this same building, another tenant alerted La Dépêche du Midi. As he left the hospital, he made sure he was locked in his home because of the breakdown. But we couldn’t reach him again.
However, Liliane Schweizer recognizes the rarity of such delays: “It is the first time that it lasts so long since I arrived in 1997”. How to explain the length of this intervention? “In very rare cases, what is called a cascade failure occurs. You repair an electronic part and find that there is another fault “behind” and so on. So, you have to make several diagnoses. This is what happened for the building on rue de la Gironde, ”explains the PACA Elevators Services company, in charge of the maintenance and repair of the elevator in the Liliale Schweizer building. Last Tuesday, the device was, in any case, again in working order.
70% of interventions are related to improper use of the device
Breakdowns such as that in the rue de la Gironde are indeed relatively rare, as the Federation of elevators explains, with supporting figures: “In Haute-Garonne as in all of France, 3/4 of interventions are linked improper use of the elevator by residents: moving, overloading, rubbish, vandalism, etc. »Lists the communications manager Zaïd Zaraket.
Several repairers in the Toulouse region confirm this trend: “We do indeed regularly have acts of vandalism, but also people who load the elevators to move, whereas it is prohibited”, explains Farid, a technician of the company Ascenseur du sud. -west, which runs from Toulouse to Bordeaux. “It’s also an information problem. Few people know the good practices for using an elevator correctly ”. But the manager sometimes points to a lack of investment in maintenance. “If you don’t take care of an elevator regularly, it can also break down. It depends on the budgets of the condominium associations, for example. The richer he is, the more easily he can take care of an elevator. “
In Haute-Garonne, the park is “relatively aging” assures the Federation of elevators. Of the 11,000 existing devices “half over 25 years and a quarter over 40 years”. But these figures date from 2013, “they are therefore to be taken with a little precaution”, the person in charge.