Skyscraper elevator plunges 84 floors — and everyone survives

Six people, including a pregnant woman, survived an elevator plunge of 84 floors, after a cable in the shaft of one of Chicago's tallest buildings snapped early Friday morning.

The group got into an elevator in the North Michigan Avenue skyscraper — formerly the John Hancock Center — after leaving a restaurant on the 95th floor around 12:30 a.m.

"At the beginning, I believed we were going to die," Jaime Montemayor, a tourist from Mexico City, told local Chicago TV station, CBS2. "We were going down and then I felt that we were falling down and then I heard a noise — clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack."

The group later found out one of the cables that holds up the elevator broke, and the car fell rapidly to the 11th floor.

"It was a precarious situation where we had the cable break on top of the elevator [and] we couldn't do an elevator to elevator rescue. We had to breach a wall," Chicago Fire Department Battalion Chief Patrick Maloney told reporters after the rescue.

So how did they do it?

A spokesperson for the Chicago Fire Department, Larry Langford, told the Chicago Tribune that once they figured out exactly where the car had come to rest, they cut a 1.5 metre by 1.5 metre hole in the wall and put a ladder down into it. A firefighter climbed down, and, one by one, helped the trapped people climb up.

Everyone got out safely.

With files from The Associated Press