Broken elevators at the Glen Square housing complex marooned aged and disabled residents in their rooms or forced them puffing up stairways in the five-story building Monday.
The six-hour outage isn't the first time the elevators have failed, residents say, and elevators aren't the only equipment that have given them grief.
Ted Hickman, 60, said he walked up five flights to bring groceries to his 88-year-old mother, Martha.
"I am too old for that sort of thing. I can tell you I was puffing," he said. "I saw some tenants stopping at every landing and they were gasping."
The elevators were malfunctioning also when he was there Sunday, Hickman said.
"They are chronically out of order, one or the other. They are down an awful lot," he said.
Some residents said they sat in the lobby talking while the elevators were repaired. Others grew tired of waiting climbed up to five flights of stairs to reach their apartments.
"It was kind of tiresome because I had bags and things to bring up, but my daughter helped me bring them up," said Mary Brown, 65, who lives on the fifth floor.
Others stayed in their apartments to avoid a hike.
"Everybody seemed to be in a pretty good mood that I was with," said Elmore Phoebus, 81, who uses a walker, but had to rely on hand rails to go down five flights of steps to go pick his wife, Ruth, 79, from the hairdresser.
Residents referred to the breakdown as the latest in a series of elevator problems.
"We've been having a lot of problems with the elevators lately," said Elenora Fant, 81, who said she was trapped three times last year in the elevators and again for 10 minutes last week.
Larry Loyd, executive director of the county Housing Authority, which owns and operates the complex, at Crain Highway and Baltimore-Annapolis Boulevard, said he was unaware of chronic elevator problems and disputed residents' claim that both elevators were broken Monday, saying, "At no time were both elevators out of service."
To find out the elevators' maintenance record would require searching handwritten work orders, he said.
Thomas Nevin, president of the Glen Burnie Volunteer Fire Company, said the firehouse a few blocks away frequently is called to rescue tenants stranded in stuck elevators at Glen Square. There were two or three such calls in the past week, he said.
Residents have complained periodically over the past four years about heating and air-conditioning at Glen Square.
Pub Date: 1/15/97
