Three employees working on the monument who were stuck in an elevator at the Eiffel Tower for much of the night thought they were losing their skin after feeling four worrying “tremendous tremors.”
“I saw my life go by and one of my colleagues really thought it was the end. […] “Just five months before the Olympic Games, I find it very worrying that something like this could happen inside one of the most visited monuments in France,” complained one of the employees, Singh Gagandip, still shocked in the “Parisien” on Tuesday. “.
The man is still struggling to recover from the incident, which occurred two weeks earlier on the night of February 16-17, when he and two colleagues had just finished insulating work on the second floor of the Eiffel Tower, he said the French newspaper.
While leaving the building at about 3:50 a.m., the elevator, which, according to the Eiffel Tower's operating company (Sete), would make “a hundred trips a day,” got stuck between the first floor and the ground floor, about thirty meters from the ground, the employee drove continued.
At this point, the three men felt four “tremendous shocks” that made them fear the worst.
“When you look from below it seems like it's nothing, but from above it's paralyzing, especially if you're as dizzy as I am,” he added to “Parisia.”
The three employees spent several hours in poor posture due to an “operator problem” that prevented them from reaching emergency services before they were rescued within 30 minutes, around 8 a.m., by firefighters from a task force in dangerous environments . Sete would have pointed this out.
“Our elevator has anti-lifting systems and parachutes that hold the cabin back in the event of an incident,” emphasizes the management. That means it would never have been solved,” the operating company emphasized reassuringly.
Nevertheless, according to Le Parisien, the employee vowed never to enter the Eiffel Tower again.
In 2023, according to Sete, the elevator in question would have traveled 8,760 km between the ground floor and the upper floor and would have broken down at only 0.3% during the year.