If you get stuck in an Elevator will the Emergency Phone Work?

You get on the elevator to go up to the 4th floor Doctors Office when all of a sudden it stops you push the button ring the Emergency Bell no one hears you . Now what? normally you either open a small door or its already in open the Elevator Emergency phone box is standing there ready to work Really?
Well that all depends when was the last time it was checked to see if it even works? was it when it was inspected last year ?
Well as you can see this is a big problem especially when you cell phone will not work either. yes in fact late night workers and maintenance/Cleaning people have been trapped inside an elevator for as long as 72 hours on a long holiday weekend when the building is locked up and everyone has gone home.

This is why it is imperative that elevator phones be checked to make sure there working. the problem thou is there has been no code requiring it other than annual inspection. But that has all changed now that ASME ( American Society of Mechanical Engineers ) Yes the idiots who came up with the Elevator Shunt trip circuit which can trap you in an elevator during a fire has come out with a new standard ASME A17.1 which now requires all new elevator phones to be supervised similar to how we now supervise lines on Fire Alarms to insure the phone line to the elevator is actually working. The problem has always been the Elevator phone line must be dedicated just to the elevator no other phones on it so it will not be jammed . unlike a Fire panel which has a special relay which turns off the premise phone so it will not interfere and starts beeping if phone lines voltage goes out. with the line dedicated to the elevator you have no way of knowing if it works or not .
Why it took the code geniuses so long to come up with this excellent code is beyond me we should have had something like this all along.
But as usual it had to take tragedy's to have it put in place . There is no such thing as forward thinking in code panels and then when they do make codes they never ever think them thru to address local or gray area issues.

Well the good folks at Viking Electronics Inc. now make a new unit LV-1K which can be seen in the image at left which can be added to there emergency elevator phone units as you see in the image above . Which now supervises the elevators phone line. for more information on this and all kinds of neat telecom products got to.

http://www.vikingelectronics.com/