Elevator Investigations Webinar Series

This video was recorded from the live webinar on September 24, 2026.

Common Topics in Elevator Investigations

In this 30-min webinar, elevator/escalator expert Michael Vallone, C.E.I., will walk through three of the most common types of injury-causing elevator incidents: misleveling, door strikes, and jolting. His presentation will outline the technical issues at the heart of these incidents, elevator safety features and technology, maintenance and inspection requirements for elevators, and the steps taken in a forensic investigation to determine causation.

Transcript Excerpt

Door strikes are when the cab door or the car door makes contact with a passenger. And there are two doors on an elevator system. There is a cab door. That is the door that you see when you're standing in the elevator and going from floor to floor, and there's a hoistway door or multiple hoistway doors. And those hoist way doors are the doors that you see when you're standing in the hallway looking into an elevator waiting for an elevator.

So the the door strikes are going to the the components that control the doors are going to be a door operator and a door reopening device.

There's multiple versions of door reopening device depending on when the elevator was installed and what code it was installed to. So if you've got an older elevator, you may still have a safety edge. A safety edge is a mechanical reopening device that is, a black plastic piece that drops down from the door and you have to make physical contact with that. And once you make physical contact and you push it back, it makes a set of electrical contacts up and that's what reopens the door.

You may have a normal infrared style door reopening device. Infrared style is, you've got an emitter and a detector, and it sends multiple, usually over a 100 infrared style beams across that door opening. And if one of those beams is broken, then that door gets the reopen signal. The newest, latest, greatest code actually requires a 3D door reopening device.

It it requires that the door reopening device be projected out into the hallway. So those infrared beams actually have to detect an oncoming object.

And if there's somebody walking towards the elevator at a certain speed, at a certain size, that door reopening device has to detect that and open those doors even if they haven't crossed the threshold of the elevator.

So the door operator controls the door speed and the door force. That is what's set when we install an elevator.

There are requirements for that. The door speed is actually the kinetic energy of the doors, and we measure it in speed because it's hard to come up with a kinetic energy over the whole opening. So we measure that in door speed.

That is going to be a sticker or data tag that is on top of the door operator, on top of the elevator, and that's going to be filled out by the manufacturer that says based on this door operator, based on the doors that are installed here, this is the speed at which these doors should close.

The door force is a maximum of 30 pounds of force, and that is how forceful the doors close. And there's many tools to test this and and evaluate it. But, basically, if the maximum within the code is thirty thirty pounds of force, we like to see that more between 25 to 28 at the most as a mechanic.

There's there's nothing in the code that states that the doors cannot make contact with a passenger. So that's why we use the door force and the door kinetic energy or the door speed in order to determine if these doors are operating properly. And some of that can be done with video. Some of that can be if we get out there soon enough to test it, but that is that is what we're evaluating in a in a case with a door strike.

Featuring

Michael Vallone, C.E.I.

Elevator & Escalator Expert

Michael Vallone is an elevator and escalator expert with over 20 years of industry experience as a field mechanic, maintenance supervisor, and operations manager. His expertise extends to all aspects… read more.