The elevator industry and your career

Tamsin Iwasaki reported for her first day at Northcrest Elevator at 6:45 on a wet Monday morning in Seattle. She had spent two years in a general construction laborer job, finished the trades entry course, and applied to Northcrest after watching an elevator crew set rails in a tower across the street from her last site. The branch office sits in an industrial unit in the south end of the city, with a stores room, a small training room and a yard full of crated rail and drums of hydraulic oil. Lena Ostrander, the field superintendent, met her at the door with a hard hat, a harness fitted to her size, a copy of the company safety manual and a printed schedule for her first week. By noon Tamsin had been paired with Ray Abernethy, a mechanic with 27 years in the trade, who would be her mentor for the year. This course follows Tamsin through her first months: what the elevator industry is, how an elevator works, and above all how mechanics in this trade go home safe every day.

What the elevator trade does

Elevator mechanics install, maintain, repair, modernize and test the equipment that moves people and goods vertically and on inclines: passenger and freight elevators, escalators, moving walks, dumbwaiters, wheelchair and platform lifts, material lifts and, in some jurisdictions, construction hoists. The industry calls all of these elevating devices or conveyances. Very few trades cover such a wide spread of skills. On one job a mechanic may be setting steel rail brackets with a hammer drill; on the next, reading a ladder diagram for a relay controller built in 1962; on the next, connecting a laptop to a variable frequency drive. The common thread is that every piece of equipment carries the public, often thousands of trips a day, and that the mechanic works where a car, a counterweight or a step band can move.

The work divides into four lines of business, and most mechanics work in more than one of them over a career. New installation crews build equipment in new buildings, starting from an empty concrete hoistway. Service or maintenance mechanics run a route of buildings, carrying out scheduled preventive maintenance, answering callbacks when a unit stops, and freeing trapped passengers. Modernization crews replace controllers, machines, door equipment, power units and fixtures in existing buildings while keeping as much of the original structure as makes sense. Repair crews take on larger jobs that a route mechanic cannot finish in a visit, such as a rope replacement, a hydraulic cylinder replacement or an escalator step chain change.

Northcrest Elevator and its jobs

Northcrest is an invented mid-sized independent elevator contractor of about 60 field staff. It installs and services equipment from several manufacturers, which means its mechanics meet a wider range of equipment than those who work for a single brand. Four jobs run through this course and the rest of the elevator program, and Tamsin will work on all of them in her first months.

• Quayside Tower is a 30-story residential tower under construction. Northcrest has the contract for four machine-room-less gearless traction passenger elevators and one service elevator that will also act as the construction elevator for the other trades. When Tamsin starts, the hoistways have been poured to the 22nd floor and the crew is setting rail in the lower floors.
• Holloway Memorial Hospital has two in-ground hydraulic elevators, built in the 1980s, that serve four floors between the emergency department, imaging and two inpatient floors. Northcrest is modernizing them one at a time with new power units, valves, controllers, door operators and fixtures. The hospital needs one car running at all times, so the schedule is tight and the work areas are inside infection control barriers.
• Brackenridge Center is a three-level shopping mall with a bank of eight escalators. Northcrest services them and is replacing steps, handrails and comb plates over a series of night shifts while the mall is closed.
• Route 7 is a service route of older buildings: the Tillicum Building, a 1962 office building with two geared traction elevators and relay logic controllers; the Marlowe Apartments, a 1978 building with a four-stop hydraulic; the Delmont Hotel, which still has a freight elevator with manual gates; and a branch library with a vertical platform lift. Ray has run Route 7 for six years.

Who regulates elevating devices

In Washington, conveyances are regulated under the state's elevator law, chapter 70.87 RCW, and the rules in chapter 296-96 WAC, administered by the Elevator Program of the Department of Labor & Industries (L&I). The state has adopted ASME A17.1-2019/CSA B44-19, the Safety Code for Elevators and Escalators, and ASME A18.1-2020 for platform lifts and stairway chairlifts, effective October 2, 2023. L&I issues installation and alteration permits, inspects equipment, issues operating certificates that owners must keep current, licenses elevator contractors and licenses the mechanics who do the work. Inside the City of Seattle, the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections runs its own elevator permit and inspection program under the city's elevator code, so Northcrest deals with city inspectors on its Seattle jobs and with state inspectors elsewhere. Workplace safety for the mechanics themselves is governed by Washington's own occupational safety and health rules, enforced by L&I's Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) under a state plan that must be at least as effective as federal OSHA.

The code book is something Tamsin will carry for her whole career. It sets the rules for hoistway construction, clearances and refuge spaces, machine rooms, car and counterweight safeties, buffers, door locks and contacts, electrical protective devices, escalator step clearances and many other details, and it sets the tests that must be passed before a unit carries the public. Code editions change every few years, and a jurisdiction adopts a new edition by regulation, sometimes with local variations, so the edition that applies to a job is the one in force where and when the work is permitted. A modernization may be held to the current code for the parts being altered while the untouched parts stay under the code they were built to. Questions about which rule applies are settled by the authority having jurisdiction, never by guesswork on site.

Becoming a certified mechanic

In Washington, a person who does conveyance work must hold an elevator mechanic license from L&I or work as a registered helper or apprentice under the supervision of a licensed mechanic. L&I issues mechanic licenses in categories: Category 01 is the general elevator mechanic license, which covers the full range of conveyances and is the one Tamsin is working toward; Categories 02 to 08 are limited specialty licenses for particular kinds of equipment such as residential elevators, platform lifts or material lifts; and Category 09 is a temporary license. For Category 01, an applicant shows at least three years of acceptable experience and either a certificate of completion from a nationally recognized elevator training program such as the National Elevator Industry Educational Program (NEIEP), completion of a registered apprenticeship, or a passing score on the state exam. The state exam is open book, with 160 questions in four parts of 40 each on codes, installation, safety and maintenance, and a pass mark of 80 percent. While she is a helper, Tamsin must be supervised by a licensed mechanic for at least 75 percent of each working day, and for most categories a mechanic supervises no more than one helper.

Northcrest is a union contractor, and Tamsin is indentured in the elevator industry's apprenticeship through the union and contractors' joint program. The classroom part is the NEIEP curriculum: eight semesters of 18 weeks each, with 72 hours of instruction per semester, delivered alongside the work hours. The first six months are a probationary period that includes online training in safety and the history of the trade and the union. At the end, apprentices sit the program's mechanic exam. The program and the employer both keep records of hours and training, and Tamsin keeps her own logbook as a backup, because a gap in her records could delay her license by months.

# Months until Tamsin can apply for her certificate, from logged hours
required = 6000          # three years of experience, taken here as 3 x 2,000 hours
logged = 0                # hours at the start of the apprenticeship
week_hours = 40
weeks_worked_per_year = 48     # allows for holidays, school blocks, weather and slow periods
per_year = week_hours * weeks_worked_per_year
years = (required - logged) / per_year
print(f"hours per year: {per_year:,}")
print(f"years to reach {required:,} hours: {years:.1f}")
print(f"that is about {years * 12:.0f} months, plus the time to complete the training program and the exam")

hours per year: 1,920
years to reach 6,000 hours: 3.1
that is about 38 months, plus the time to complete the training program and the exam

Ray's advice on hours was blunt: the hours are the minimum, not the goal. A mechanic who has logged three years only on new installation will meet a service callback on a 1960s relay controller as a stranger. Northcrest rotates its apprentices through installation, modernization, repair and service so that each one sees the full range before the exam and the license.

Why safety comes first in this trade

The elevator trade is one of the more dangerous construction trades. CPWR, the construction research center run with the building trades unions, studied elevator-related deaths in US construction between 2011 and 2016 and counted 145 deaths in that period. Falls to a lower level caused 53.5 percent of them, and nearly half of those falls were from 30 feet (about 9 m) or more, which is what an open hoistway offers. The rate for elevator installers and repairers was 14.9 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers, several times the rate for construction as a whole, and the annual count rose from 14 in 2003 to 28 in 2016, with a peak of 37 in 2015. Most of the remaining deaths came from being caught in or between moving parts, being struck by a car, counterweight or falling object, and electrocution. Canadian figures are smaller because the workforce is smaller, but the pattern of hazards is the same.

Northcrest's safety record is good, and Lena wants to keep it that way. On Tamsin's first afternoon she sat through the company orientation: the right to refuse unsafe work, how to report a hazard or a near miss, the company rule that nobody enters a hoistway, pit or car top alone during their first year, and the rule that a mechanic who is not sure whether a unit is under control stops and asks. Lena told her the story of every serious injury in the branch's history, by name, because each one had changed a company rule. The lessons that follow explain those rules and the reasons behind them.

A day in the trade

Elevator work starts early and often runs long. On new installation, the crew's day is set by the general contractor's schedule and by the floors that are ready. On service, the route mechanic plans maintenance visits around building hours, and the callback phone can change the plan at any time: a stopped car in a hospital or a trapped passenger moves to the top of the list. Escalator work at the mall happens at night, when the public is out of the building. Modernization in occupied buildings means working around tenants, patients and residents who still need to get to their floors. Tamsin's first month will include all of these.

The trade also asks for physical fitness and steady nerves. Mechanics climb ladders into pits, ride car tops in hoistways forty floors high, lift heavy components, and work in tight, dirty, noisy spaces. They also need patience with documents: drawings, wiring diagrams, permits, test forms and maintenance logs. The best mechanics Tamsin met in her first week were careful, orderly and calm, and the word she heard most often was "verify".