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Elevator repair gives residents a big lift

Residents of a 55-and-older community were told it could take months to fix their sole elevator.

By VANESSA DE LA TORRE
Published August 4, 2006

CLEARWATER - For exactly a month, they waited.

These are people who live on the upper levels of a building in the Imperial Pines Condominium, a 55-and-older community. Some use wheelchairs. Some have problems with their knees, heart and lungs.

On June 28, the lone elevator in their building broke. Many couldn't leave their condos. They couldn't make doctor's appointments. Others trudged up and down the stairwell.

Residents were told that the problem - an underground hydraulic cylinder that leaked fluid - could take months to fix.

But the elevator was back in service July 28.

"It's wonderful, wonderful. I'm a very, very happy girl," said Wanda Naas. She is 73 and lives on Building C's fourth floor. Naas has one lung, and had been climbing four flights of stairs about once a day since the elevator stopped working.

The first morning the elevator was fixed, Naas used it, even though other residents were "leery about going down there, afraid that it might crash." Naas went to the grocery store, watched a movie, then went to the theater.

"My social life started again," she said.

The repairs were done in "record time," said Maureen Reardon, owner of Progressive Management, the property manager. The firm that made the repairs, Mowrey Elevator Co., was originally backlogged with four other projects before workers could get to Imperial Pines.

Then the St. Petersburg Times wrote about the stranded residents, and Mowrey made the broken Building C elevator a priority.

Work still needs to be done: Renovations to the elevator are scheduled for October. The electronics need to be updated. That means the elevator will be out of service for at least two weeks, residents were told.

"At least this time we'll be able to plan, as opposed to it breaking down," Reardon said. "That's the problem when you buy a building with one elevator."

The other buildings in Imperial Pines have two elevators each.

Carolyn Schwartz, a 72-year-old resident with heart and knee problems, has visited her cardiologist and dentist since the elevator started working again. She had been stuck in her fourth floor condo since June 28, when it broke, and needed a visiting nurse to take her blood pressure.

Schwartz said she still worries that the elevator is going to fail. She wanted the renovations to be done immediately, rather than in October.

"I would have preferred to have gotten the job done correctly," she said. "Because every time I get in the elevator now, I don't know if the electronics are going to work. And I'm going to be stuck in there."

Though there are perks to getting out of her building.

"I got to eat at a restaurant," Schwartz said.

[Last modified August 3, 2006, 23:11:47]