Williamsburg, NY – After Tragic Accident Officials Teach Children Elevator Safety

Williamsburg, NY – It was the New York City version of elementary-school earthquake drills in small-town California: survival skills for vertical living.

The city’s buildings commissioner, Robert D. LiMandri, and elevator inspectors from the Department of Buildings led 150 schoolchildren at P.S. 19 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in a chant on Monday, repeated over and over, and then over and over once more.

“I want you to remember three words, O.K.?” Mr. LiMandri told an auditorium of 7- and 8-year-old boys and girls.

“When you’re stuck in an elevator, you do three things. Say it out loud with me: Ring, relax and wait. Don’t jump out. Ring, relax and wait, and someone will come for you, O.K.?”

The schoolchildren were given handouts to take home, reminding them to ring the alarm and wait for help if they get trapped in an elevator. They also watched a video in which the safety message was repeated by a hip-hop dancing cat and were handed silver badge stickers declaring them all “junior inspectors.”

Elevators are the real mass transit of New York City: There are 60,000 of them in residential and commercial buildings, giving millions of New Yorkers millions of rides each day at home and at work, and while the majority of these rides end uneventfully, a few occasionally end tragically.

The auditorium where the children sat was about a dozen blocks from the elevator shaft where a 5-year-old boy named Jacob Neuman died last year trying to escape from a stalled public housing elevator and about 10 blocks from the shaft where a 34-year-old man died early Sunday morning, also while trying to get out of a stuck elevator.

Neither Jacob nor the man who died Sunday, Gerhardt Fuchs, were mentioned during the safety class at P.S. 19, the Roberto Clemente School. The second and third graders in the class did not know Jacob, who was not a student there. The one man in the room who perhaps knew Jacob the best had the unfortunate distinction of knowing how the boy died, not how he lived.

Chief Inspector Douglas Smith stood on the stage in front of a microphone stand and quietly and nervously reminded the children to stay clear of elevator doors when they are closing and to stay put if the elevator gets stuck. “You never jump out of an elevator if you get stuck,” Mr. Smith told the children. “Also, it is important to get first aid and CPR training to learn what to do in these types of situations.”

Mr. Smith investigated the accident that killed Jacob and was one of two inspectors who wrote the department’s official report on it. The report describes the electrical problems that led to the accident in technical language void of emotion (“the door open relay contacts on the control board were worn,” it reads).

On Monday, Mr. Smith, 51, who arrived at the scene that August morning a little over an hour after Jacob fell, was as matter-of-fact as his 52-page report.

Asked after his presentation if he still thought about Jacob, Mr. Smith, who in his 10 years with the department has investigated two dozen elevator-related fatalities, said, “I think about them all, to tell you the truth.”

Since 2004, there have been 99 elevator accidents in New York City in which a child was injured, though all of them, except for Jacob’s accident, resulted in minor injuries, according to the Buildings Department. Since that year, inspectors with the department’s elevator unit have taught the safety classes to thousands of New York City schoolchildren each November as part of National Elevator Escalator Safety Awareness Week. This year’s national safety week, which is organized annually by the nonprofit Elevator Escalator Safety Foundation, ends on Saturday.

Over the next two weeks, the city inspectors will give the presentation they gave at P.S. 19 to more than 2,000 children at 13 elementary schools in the five boroughs.

Mr. Fuchs, a popular drummer, had attended a benefit party at a mixed residential and commercial building in Williamsburg, and was trying to jump from an elevator that had stopped between floors when his jacket caught on something, causing him to fall, the authorities said. The elevator was for freight and was manually operated. The authorities said on Monday that the elevator was working properly and did not stall, but that Mr. Fuchs and another man in the elevator with him failed to operate it correctly and level it with the floor. “This is human error,” Mr. LiMandri said of the accident.

The “ring, relax and wait” mantra, which Mr. LiMandri said he wanted to become as common and as widespread as the “stop, drop and roll” fire safety technique, seemed to sink in. “In case you get stuck you have to push the alarm button and wait, wait for help,” said Tania Cortes, 7, a third grader. “This helped kind of to remind me.”