An Earthquake Stopped Their San Francisco Elevator Between Floors. They Climbed Out Seconds Before the Cable Snapped
A family was riding a glass elevator in San Francisco when an earthquake hit. They pried the doors and climbed out just before the cable snapped and the car fell.
On this page
Rachel Santos, 37, had promised her son Leo a day in the city for his eighth birthday. They drove up from San Jose with her husband, Victor, 40, to see a Giants game, and Leo wore his orange and black Giants cap the whole way. Before the game, they stopped at a downtown hotel with a glass elevator that ran up the outside of the building. Leo wanted to ride it to the top for the view of the bay.
Rachel was filming on her phone as the car rose past the twentieth floor, the skyline sliding by behind the glass.
The Jolt
It started with a bang, like something heavy had hit the elevator from above. The car lurched sideways. Leo grabbed the handrail. Rachel’s camera swung toward the glass, and what it captured outside is the reason her video has been shown on news channels around the world.
The tower across the street was swaying. Not shaking, swaying, its top moving back and forth against the sky like a tree in the wind. Windows on its upper floors were popping out of their frames and falling, glittering in the sunlight. Somewhere below, car alarms and screams rose from the street.
The elevator shuddered to a stop.
Between Floors
The digital display froze between 23 and 24. The lights flickered and went out. Through the gap at the top of the elevator doors, they could see the concrete edge of the 24th floor, about three feet above the floor of the car. Gray dust was pouring in through the gap like smoke.
Victor, an engineer who works on bridge inspections, did not wait for an announcement. He jammed his fingers into the seam between the doors and pulled. They did not move. He braced his foot against the wall and pulled again, his glasses fogging with dust, and the doors slid open a foot, then two.
“Rachel,” he said, very calmly. “We need to get out right now.”
“Hold My Hand!”
The building was still moving. Victor lifted Leo first, pushing him up through the gap onto the 24th floor landing. A hotel guest in the hallway grabbed the boy’s arms and pulled him through. Rachel climbed next, Victor shoving her up by the legs while she clawed at the carpet. In the video you can hear her screaming, “Hold my hand! Victor, hold my hand!”
She turned around, lay flat on the floor, and reached down. Victor grabbed her wrist and pulled himself up as the elevator car groaned beneath him.
He had just gotten his knees onto the landing when they heard the sound. A sharp crack, like a gunshot, then a long metallic whine. One of the hoist cables had snapped. The elevator car dropped away behind him into the shaft.
The emergency brakes caught it several floors down with a scream of steel. Nobody was inside.
The Window
The shaking stopped after about forty seconds, though it felt much longer. The family huddled in the hallway with a dozen other guests as the fire alarms rang. Plaster dust covered everything. Leo had lost his Giants cap somewhere in the elevator.
It was Leo who walked to the window at the end of the hallway. From the 24th floor, you could see across the rooftops to the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge.
“Mom,” he said. “The bridge is still standing.”
Then, a moment later, his voice changed. “Mom. Why is the water going away?”
Rachel came to the window. Out in the bay, the water along the shoreline was visibly draining back, pulling away from the piers and the seawall, exposing mud flats that are never above water.
What It Meant
Victor knew what it meant before anyone else in the hallway did. When the sea pulls back after a large earthquake, a surge can follow. He started knocking on hotel room doors, telling people to stay on the upper floors and away from the waterfront.
Within minutes, phones in the hallway lit up with emergency alerts. A tsunami advisory had been issued for the bay shoreline. The surge, when it came about twenty minutes later, was smaller than feared, a few feet of fast-moving water that flooded the Embarcadero, swamped parked cars, and damaged several piers. Because people had been warned and moved away from the waterline, injuries were limited.
Getting Home
The family walked down 24 flights of stairs two hours later, after firefighters cleared the building. The Giants game, of course, was canceled. They spent the night on cots at a school gym in the Mission District and drove home the next afternoon.
A hotel maintenance worker found Leo’s cap when the elevator was recovered and mailed it back to the family with a handwritten note: “Happy birthday, buddy. Your dad is a hero.”
Victor does not like that word. “I just knew we couldn’t wait,” he said. “In an earthquake, the thing that kills people is waiting for someone else to tell them what to do.”
Leo says his next birthday will be at the bowling alley. On the ground floor.
More Stories Like This
If your heart is still pounding, read our stories about the beach wedding interrupted by a tsunami siren, the meteor that crashed a backyard birthday party in Arizona, and the Kansas mom who outran a wedge tornado to a stranger’s storm cellar.
