Below is a photo of a geared traction machine that has completely run out of gear oil, and worse; the gear oil leak has traveled over to the brake drum, soaking the brake pads.

All the red arrows point to places on the machine where gear oil is escaping. The problem here is two-fold. One, the machine is all but void of gear oil, causing the worm gear and ring gear to wear far more prematurely than expected. Two, the oil has traveled to the brake drum, and subsequently soaked the brake pads with oil. When our consultants visited this job, they instructed the building owner to place the elevator out of service.

Why? I’ll tell you why.

Suppose the elevator was running high speed in the down direction from the top floor (a 14 story building) and suddenly the power in the building was lost. One of two things can happen here…

The elevator machine would instantly apply the brake, but the chances of an oil soaked brake pad stopping a fully accelerated elevator are slim to none. Chances are, the elevator would continue to run through the brake, gain speed, and either (a) trip the governor overspeed thereby bringing the elevator to a violent halt, or (b) continue to run full speed onto the pit buffers causing an even more violent stop.

If you’re passenger in this elevator under either one of those conditions, the end result would be nothing short of disturbing. While there is a very slim chance that the elevator would stop normally, there was no reason for us to believe it would - or could.   So in the interest of public safety (our primary concern), we recommended the elevator be taken out of service, and a call to the elevator maintenance company be made immediately.

This was taken care of in short order, but the rest of the report took quite a bit longer.