Federal safety regulators have just issued an appeal for action by Airbnb and other vacation rental platforms, calling on these businesses to help their 'hosts' and guests safeguard against the potentially lethal hazard posed by residential elevators that are present in many rental properties.
The move arrives less than two weeks after a visiting child died in a residential elevator while staying at a beach rental home in North Carolina's Outer Banks. The seven-year-old boy was found between the bottom of an elevator car and the home's upper door frame, his neck crushed, after he'd evidently become trapped between the product's inner and outer doors when the elevator was activated.
Home elevators that were installed more than just a few years ago may contain a gap between the product's outer (home-facing) door and inner accordion doors that's deep enough for a child to fit inside while both doors are closed. Jordan Nelson, who was 10 years old at the time, suffered one such horrific accident in 2013 while his family was staying at a rented beach house in South Carolina, which left him paralyzed and with catastrophic brain injury when the elevator failed to stop with him caught between the doors.
It was only in 2017, following decades of outcries from safety advocates and several lawsuits, that the nation's elevator safety code shrank the allowable space between the two sets of doors. Unfortunately, the new safety code regulations only impact new elevator installations, leaving existing in-home elevators across the country-which CBS News reported number in the hundreds of thousands-remaining potential death traps for unsuspecting kids.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is now urging vacation rental companies to require that the 'hosts' who use their platforms to rent out their private properties either disable in-home elevators while renters are present or provide proof of an inspection to guarantee that such dangerous gaps don't exist.
"Residential elevators can pose a deadly but unforeseen hazard to children, particularly children who are encountering them in vacation or rental homes," Robert Adler, the CPSC's Acting Chairman, wrote as part of the agency's appeal to Airbnb-type rental platforms for their help to avoid any such future tragedies. "Children, some as young as two and as old as 12, have been crushed to death in this gap, suffering multiple skull fractures, fractured vertebrae and traumatic asphyxia," Adler noted. "Other children have suffered horrific and lifelong injuries."
According to the CPSC, residential elevators are frequently found in townhomes or multi-level homes, vacation homes and rentals and homes that have been converted to inns or bed-and-breakfast accommodations.
There are relatively inexpensive ways to make existing gaps safer, Adler explained in his letter, "by placing space guards on the back of the hoistway door or installing an electronic monitoring device that deactivates the elevator when a child is detected in the gap."
In his appeal, Adler asked vacation rental platforms to immediately notify all renters about the potential hazard via email or by displaying a warning box on their booking pages. He also requested that they require their 'hosts' to, "lock outer access doors or otherwise disable the elevators in their properties unless and until those members provide proof of an inspection to certify that no hazardous gap exists" and have inspections be required for anyone posting a listing on their platform going forward.
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