It was operator error, not equipment failure, that caused the latest elevator problem at the Washington Monument.
That’s according to elevator experts who were called in Tuesday to check out the system.
“Elevator technicians have determined that multiple and conflicting requests directing the elevator to different levels of the Washington Monument were the source of Saturday’s service interruption,” said National Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst.
The requests came from staff, not tourists.
For about an hour on Saturday, the monument’s elevator would not return to ground level. No one was stuck inside at the time. After a system reset, about 40 visitors at the top were finally able to ride the elevator back down.
Since it reopened last week after a three-year closure, the elevator has been running without a human operator in the cab — something it always had in the past.
“As a lesson learned from Saturday’s hiccup, we are upgrading the system to better communicate the elevator’s location and movements to the staff in order to avoid such errors in the future,” Litterst said.
