Durie Hill elevator under repair at LJ Engineering.
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One of the Durie Hill elevator cables snapped while an operator was inside it and emergency brakes had to kick into gear.
The elevator, which turns 100-years-old in August next year, has been closed since September when the incident happened and the Whanganui District Council says it's in good shape considering its age.
"All the failsafe mechanisms worked as they were supposed to: the emergency brake activated and the remaining cables held the elevator securely," said the council's general manager of property, Leighton Toy.
"The staff member, a rostered elevator operator, contacted the council's property officer in line with our emergency procedures."
The elevator was then raised using its manual winch, so the operator could be safely released.
"I have reviewed the detail of the breakdown and can assure the public that this venerable old piece of equipment performed exceptionally well," Toy said.
"I've also reviewed the service history of the elevator and am satisfied that we were on top of its service and maintenance requirements."
Maintenance was carried out in August, which included adjustment to the braking mechanism, and the elevator's Certificate of Compliance had recently been renewed.
The council's facilities management officer, Peter Tantrum, said he expected the elevator to be back in operation by the middle of November.
He said one cable was strong enough to hold a carload of people and in this situation there were three cables that were able to hold the elevator in place when one snapped.
Peter Tantrum and Lawrence Calman standing over the parts of the elevator.
"We'd been monitoring the cable situation," he said. "There was a little bit of deterioration which was expected for its age ... we had a failing with one of those cables.
"[The] engineer that has commented ... has actually said its quite common practice for them to fail like they have.
"Ours wasn't as bad as what a lot of them get before they fail. We had planned to replace them before the failure but once we had the failure we thought we'd do the whole refurbishment."
Getting the elevator back in operation by mid-November was dependent on parts being delivered from the United States in time, Tantrum said.
The elevator has been dismantled and its historic parts are sitting on the shop floor at LJ Engineering where they've been assessed by Lawrence Calman.
"Everything here will be stripped, cleaned, checked," Calman said.
"The old girl's in relatively good nick ... apart from a bit of wear and tear here and there and the wire rope needing replacing and a little bit of water ingression into the shaft which is starting to cause a wee bit of concern ... she's in pretty good nick."
Engineers checking the elevator in 2015.
He said there was a bit of wear in the main shaft and some parts would need to be replaced.
"We're not sure whether [the shaft] is 100 years old or not but a new piece of steel has been ordered and it will be a new shaft machined to take out the side stop and the gearbox and fitted up with good old style English gib keys, which hold the gears on to the shaft and everything else like that.
"We have a bit of wear in there, we have a bit of side thrust. We need to eliminate that. That's currently where we're at - to strip all this and clean it all."
Calman worked as an apprentice about 40 years ago at Council workshops he described as "long extinct" and did work on the elevator back then.
