Robby Burch, Eric Harley and Martin Culp are all in the trenches.
Dodging the cake from last week’s food fight and the ever-present pools of vomit to save errant ID cards, flip-flops and – perhaps more often than you’d think – a piece of underwear.
This trio are responsible for maintaining the university’s 176 elevators (144 academic, 32 residential), a job that demands a highly technical set of skills and a stomach for Animal House antics, or at least their aftermath. They keep the cars running, retrieve items that slip between the cracks and occasionally save a trapped student. A look at the work of these backstage university players offers a window into a sometimes dirty, surprising and – somewhat shockingly – richly rewarding world.
“My favorite thing about the shift is being able to learn something new,” said Culp, a veteran electrician who came to elevators late in life but has taken up the trade with fervor. “I’m at the age where everything is the same old thing. I’m seeing something new, and I have the opportunity to learn something.”
Culp blushes while he describes plucking the underwear that ends up hanging from elevator cables, a consequence of the drafts inside the shaft blowing laundry around.
But there’s more to keeping the campus elevators running smoothly than clearing out the lingerie.
With new government restrictions in place, elevator technicians are required to attend four-year programs and pass an exit exam to start working, though Culp and Burch were exempted under a grandfather clause.
“We go to school for elevators,” Harley explained.
The team will be responsible in the coming months for helping to install new technologies meant to improve the safety of the campus’ elevators.
After a student at Ohio State University died of an elevator-related accident in October 2006, Culp is working with Residential Affairs to install rope grippers and infrared detectors in elevators in the high-rise dorms to modernize the elevators most frequently used by students.
The initiative, which began a couple weeks ago, should take about six months to complete. Though the university has never had a serious accident under Culp’s watch, he said the modernization is a proactive measure to make sure the incident doesn’t happen here.
The new sensors in the doors can tell when a person is standing in the doorway without bumping the person. The rope grippers are a last defense to hold cars in place.
For those who labor on the elevators, it can be a rewarding career.
Before coming to the university, Culp worked more than 20 years as an electrician in Washington. At the time, there were no open positions in the electrical shop, but the university was losing the head of its elevator department. Culp had no experience with elevators – “none, I used to get in and ride them,” he said.
But after a year of training (before the new requirements were passed) he was set to make what he describes as a life-changing transition.
Now he flips through issues of Elevator World, a trade magazine, in his spare time. He joined Elevator U, an organization for elevator technicians at college campuses across the country, and spoke at its convention in 2007. This year he plans to fly to Arizona for the event.
“That’s exactly the type of person you want,” Director of Operations and Maintenance Jack Baker said. “He lives and breathes elevators.”
Culp says the work gives him such satisfaction that he plans to delay his retirement. Before he started with the university, Culp said six years ago he pictured himself today as “an electrician nearing retirement.” Now he says he’ll stick with it until he’s 67, though these days Culp spends much of his time doing the paperwork as the supervisor.
Burch, the head technician, is a veteran of the elevator trade.
Over his 25 years in the industry – much of it in Washington – Burch said he got calls sometimes three or four times a night to go save someone trapped in an elevator. Along with his 60 to 70-hour work weeks, he was usually on call 24 hours a day.
There were some exciting perks, too – Burch says his name is inscribed at the top of the elevator shaft in the Washington Monument.
At the university, he says, things are more relaxed.
Of course, there are still the vicissitudes of the college campus to deal with. Fireworks have exploded in elevators. Beer and vomit are common obstacles. Denton Hall experienced a food fight with cakes and pies last Monday night (Culp suspected the women’s basketball loss was the catalyst).
And there is still the occasional student or professor to pluck from an unyielding elevator car. If the space between the floor and the ceiling of the car is more than eight inches, other workers on the campus who are trained to open stuck cars can help the trapped to safety. But if the space is smaller, an elevator technician has to be called in.
The elevator crew maintains, however, that most movie depictions of elevators careening into ground floor are very unrealistic – the mechanics of the elevator are such that the car would actually fall up.
“What you see on TV is TV,” Burch said. Instead, the crew agreed that the “must watch” elevator movie is Speed.
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