Erin Su and 14 other students found themselves trapped in one of the Westwood Chateau elevators.

They called dispatch, only to be told it would take an hour for someone to come help the students. Worried about suffocating from the heat, they tried to manually open the doors, but to no avail – they were stuck between two floors.

Only after 40 minutes did the fire department finally come to rescue them.

The stressful experience of those 15 students is not an anomaly at UCLA. Problems with elevators cause issues not only in university apartment buildings but also in buildings on campus and on the Hill.

The Daily Bruin checked the permits of more than 80 elevators on the UCLA campus and the Hill between August and November of 2024 and compared the listed expiration dates with inspection logs provided by UCLA Media Relations. The Bruin found that 71 elevators were inspected after the expiration date listed on the permit.

In addition, the average time between the expiration of the elevators and third-party inspection is 34 days. The longest time period where an elevator’s permit was not updated since its state expiration date was 615 days.

In an emailed statement, UCLA Facilities Management said the prevalence of expired permits is due to delays in the state’s inspection process. As a quicker alternative, UCLA relies on third-party state-licensed elevator mechanics. But considering the paperwork must still go through the state after the inspection, UCLA Facilities Management said new permits are often still delayed by one to three months.

And yet The Bruin found that the delays are not just related to paperwork. Thirty of the elevators checked by The Bruin were not even inspected until more than 30 days past the expiration dates shown on the elevators’ physical permits, further delaying the already slow process of receiving inspection reports from the state.

Students and faculty interviewed by The Bruin spoke to extensive issues with the elevators which were, at times, an inconvenience – but at worst, a serious accessibility issue.

Former UCLA Dining staff member Marina Youssef got stuck in two different elevators on the Hill: the first in Bruin Plate and the second near Epicuria at Covel.

When she got stuck in the Bruin Plate elevator, Youssef said she was unable to call for help because she did not have cell service. She was stuck for 30 minutes.

“I started panicking,” Youssef said. “It was really bad, traumatizing.”

She now avoids the UCLA elevators. However, Youssef said on-campus workers are frequently required to use the elevators for various job responsibilities.

Caroll Loupeda, for example, also got stuck in an elevator while working. She said she got stuck in the Ackerman Union service elevator on the first floor while on shift at ASUCLA Catering. She was stuck for two hours while transporting full trash bags.

Loupeda, a fourth-year environmental science student, said she was disappointed with UCLA’s lack of urgency and preparedness to deal with the broken elevators.

This delay was especially frustrating, Loupeda said, since it took time from her shift, forcing her to stay late to finish all of her tasks.

UCLA Facilities Management said its response time for stalled elevators is typically around 15 minutes during working hours and less than an hour outside working hours.

However, Natasha Tabatabai, a third-year political science student, got stuck in an elevator at Olympic Hall in spring 2024 and received no response when she pressed the help button. Though the elevator doors did open a few minutes after originally getting stuck, she said this resulted in her being late to her club rehearsal.

Faulty infrastructure like broken elevators creates an especially difficult situation for students with mobility disabilities, said Victoria Marks, the chair of the disability studies major at UCLA.

David Serlin, a professor in the communications department at UC San Diego, said although most people see the lack of access to elevators as a minor inconvenience, these “inconveniences” cause significant barriers for students with disabilities.

Marks said one of the biggest challenges individuals with disabilities face is the inaccessibility of certain buildings on campus, including the fact that many rooms are not on ground level.

Maya Siegel, a fourth-year education student and member of the Disabled Student Union, said students with mobility impairments often have trouble reaching their destinations. At times, they even have to call for urgent assistance just to get in or out of their university residences, Siegel added.

“I have had to sacrifice my comfort,” Siegel said. “I’ve had to trudge down the stairwell and up the stairwell, which has caused me to miss classes and have to replace extended deadlines on assignments because that caused me to feel even more unwell and unable to tend to my academics.”

Unreliable elevators are not just an inconvenience, she said, but also a painful obstacle that creates an inaccessible campus environment for her.

Roxas Hayes, a third-year disability studies student and a member of DSU, said the unpredictability of elevators forces them into exhausting and painful situations that have made them feel excluded and undermined their experience on campus.

“If I have to walk up stairs, I’m going to be in so much more pain than I have to be,” Hayes said. “Being in more pain means I have less capacity to do my schoolwork.”

Hayes said the elevator in Ackerman Union is frequently out of order and is not fixed in a timely manner, despite being a high-traffic elevator.

UCLA administration’s lack of urgency to inspect the elevators emphasizes their apathy for students with disabilities, Hayes said.

On top of this, students with disabilities have said UCLA does not communicate elevator shutdowns in a timely manner.

For Grace Overman, a second-year disability studies and history student, a broken elevator can mean missing class entirely. She said UCLA often does not provide formal warnings or updates on maintenance, making it so students like Overman, who rely on mobility aids, are often left stranded and forced to find alternative, extremely inconvenient routes to class.

“We are treated as an afterthought, as something tacked on later,” Overman said.

Siegel said she and other students with disabilities generally preplan the routes for all their trips to campus. So it is crucial for her to know in advance which areas of campus are inaccessible on any given day.

However, Siegel said mapping out her routes is often useless because when an elevator on her route does break down, the only notice provided by UCLA administration is a piece of paper taped to the elevator door.

“We are traveling quite a distance to discover that that pathway is no longer accessible, when it might have been yesterday,” Siegel said.

She said this often forces her to travel an extra distance or turn around entirely, which causes a physical and emotional toll and harms her academics by causing her to need extended deadlines and miss classes.

“You’re literally having to walk usually double the distance, which again is the opposite of the purpose of elevators and accessibility,” Siegel said.

Brian Goldfarb, an associate professor of communications at UCSD, said issues with the elevators can also cause dangerous complications for students with disabilities in the case of emergency evacuations.

Siegel said that after fire alarm drills in her university apartment, Westwood Chateau, elevators take at least 48 hours to get back up and running, which is problematic for students who need elevators to go to and from ground level.

She said she has been through three or four fire drills and has had to call to ask the university apartment’s front desk to turn the elevators back on each time. She forces herself to take the stairs, which she said is a very painful option for her.

“There have been times where my condition causes me to dislocate joints regularly,” Siegel said. “There have been times where I’ve been literally trapped in my apartment.”

Restoring elevator access is a scheduled process, so it is possible for them to ensure the elevator returns in a timely manner if they schedule ahead of time, Siegel said.

Overman added that there is a critical need for better communication from the administration regarding on-campus accessibility issues, such as elevator outages and construction blocking ramps.

“Tell us what is going on,” Overman said. “A lot of issues with accessibility can at least be mitigated by just communicating what is going on.”

Christopher Ikonomou, an alumnus who graduated in 2023, said if a particular pathway is inaccessible, students with disabilities may need to modify or cancel their plans entirely.

“When you are a physically disabled person on this campus, you learn to traverse like it’s a series of underground tunnels,” Ikonomou said.

He said reaching the edge of South Campus requires going up three flights of stairs. To bypass this, he takes a shortcut by using the elevator in the UCLA Store up to the second floor, where the bridge to Kerckhoff patio is.

And in order to avoid the Royce Hall stairs, Ikonomou said students with disabilities often walk down to the elevator located near the arts buildings.

“Even if technically accessible routes exist, they are out of the way, the elevators often break down, you have to go through other buildings, and it’s very convoluted,” Ikonomou said. “You can’t ever run late because then you’ll really, really run late.”

He added that traversing the Hill is even harder because there are no elevators to bypass the long stairs. He said it used to take him up to 45 minutes to walk from Ackerman Union to Hedrick Summit.

“That was the most morale-crushing journey of my freshman year, where I was like, ‘Is this what it’s going to be for the next four years?’” Ikonomou said.

Hayes said it is disheartening and worrying to see that UCLA seems to neglect elevator access on campus.

Overman said she also feels accessibility issues are often overlooked, and students with disabilities are not given the same level of attention and consideration as other underrepresented groups on campus.

Public institutions should meet the diversity of student needs by locating accessible routes in thoughtful ways that are clearly indicated for students with disabilities as a means of eliminating physical barriers, Goldfarb said.

“We are not a valued part of the student body,” Overman said. “We don’t get the same treatment of holding us up … and valuing our thoughts and experiences.”