Ten people trapped in Sainsbury’s lift for two hours

Sainsbury’s has apologised after 10 people were left trapped in a broken lift at one of its stores for more than two hours.

Jason Redshaw, 53, said the lift at the Blackpool supermarket made an “awful noise” before plunging down and then slamming to a halt, knocking those inside off their feet, at around 14:00 BST on Monday.

Mr Redshaw told the BBC for the first hour they were “banging on doors and screaming” but could not make contact with anybody on the outside after the emergency call system in the lift failed.

Sainsbury’s said it had been in touch with the customers and was “very sorry” for their experience.

Mr Redshaw, who owns fancy dress and TV prop hire firm Cabaret Costumes, said he will “never get in a lift again” after the experience.

He said he had parked on the first floor car park of the Talbot Street supermarket and got into the lift with his partner, 65-year-old David Charles-Cully, to go down to the shopping area on the ground floor.

“As soon as the door closed we heard this awful kind of grinding, crunching noise as if something was scraping against the side of the elevator and we heard this noise from above,” he said.

“Now I thought it sounded like the belt system was actually giving way, and then suddenly we felt as if the ground kind of fell away beneath us and as if basically we were dropping and that the system had just failed.”

He said the lift’s brakes then kicked in bringing it to a sudden and violent halt.

Mr Redshaw said he stood up and managed to prise the doors open by around a centimetre with a pair of nail-clippers – only to be faced with a brick wall.

“We had to endure the first hour of banging on the doors and screaming to try and get the attention of the staff,” he said.

Those trapped included a man with a lung condition and another who had recently been diagnosed with heart failure, as well as older shoppers in their 70s.

Mr Redshaw also said he is asthmatic, and had to use his inhaler a number of times in the “stuffy” lift.

He said: “One gentleman had bought a frying pan and he was actually using it to bang on the metal doors of the lift but to no avail, nobody could hear us.”

Mr Redshaw said when they tried pressing the emergency button it was “just so antiquated” and the person on the other side could not hear them.

After around an hour, firefighters managed to prise open the doors around an inch, allowing supermarket staff to pass drinks and chocolate bars through.

The ordeal came to an end at about 16:00 BST, when a lift engineer who had been stuck in traffic en route from Chester arrived on site.

He said: “I think when you go through something that’s traumatic, on the actual day when it happens it’s fresh trauma, so you’re dealing with that as it’s happening.

“It’s only afterwards when you sit down and you take in what could have happened, you actually start to think about it – maybe overthink a little bit too much.

“That’s where, I’m not going to say it’s upset me, but it certainly made me very wary.”

Mr Redshaw added that he had noticed the lift had been out of service the previous week, which he said made him concerned “it had happened before”.

None of the passengers suffered serious injuries in the incident.

A Sainsbury’s spokesperson said, “Our Blackpool store manager is in contact with the customers involved and has explained how sorry we are for their experience.

“The lift remains closed while this incident is fully investigated.”