OK County jail maintenance director details hardships with one working elevator

With our current elevators, this last year we've seen 57 times that our elevators have gone down individually. Some of those times we did have trapped personnel to include inmates. I couldn't give you duration or time frame on how long they were stuck on the elevators, but that was seven times. Our existing elevators are 37 years old, like Mr. Kimmery had noted, typical lifespan of our type of elevators is 25 to 30 years. We have exceeded that, of course. Our down times contribute to slower reaction times, emergency calls to include nursing journeys, inmate on inmates, inmate on officers, SB1s, which are suicide attempts. This can lead to serious injury, of course, or death, leaving us up to potential lawsuits because of that. We have a monthly average of 47 nursing journeys, 20 IMSA calls, and 20 active, I'm sorry, excuse me, two active SB1s, and that is in a three month period average.