NEW PORT RICHEY, Fla. (WFLA) — Gail McDaniel is confined to a wheelchair and now stuck inside her second floor apartment at Summer Lake Villas. This is because the elevator she relies on has been out of order for more than a week.
“I’m afraid to live up here without the elevator,” McDaniel said.
She’s missed two important doctor’s appointments and contacted Better Call Behnken for help getting answers from apartment management.
“It’s very, very upsetting, and I just don’t know what to do about it,” McDaniel said.
McDaniel says management tell her they ordered a part to fix the elevator, but they don’t know when it will be repaired. She says she asked to move into another apartment on the first floor, but there is not one available.
8 On Your Side found McDaniel isn’t the only one confined to their apartment because of a broken elevator. In fact, many of the complex’s 15 buildings have broken elevators. Summer Lake is popular among disabled residents because it is has an elevator.
Management tells Better Call Behnken this elevator outage is due to a storm on July 17. Lightning, they say, hit a breaker box on the side of the building and it somehow affected numerous elevators. We were assured workers were working on the problem Monday morning and would continue to work on it until the problems is fixed.
Other residents, like Donna Hulen, say the elevators to out routinely and she was left in her apartment last year for three weeks because of an out-of-order elevator. She uses a wheelchair and ended up moving to a first floor apartment.
Pasco County Fire Rescue officials say they have been called out to help several residents get out of their homes to go doctor’s appointments or leave their apartments. That takes public resources away from possible emergency situations. However, Pasco officials can’t force Summer Lake management to fix elevators, because no codes are being broken. That’s because there are stairs for residents to use to leave their apartments.
But for residents, such as McDaniel, that does little help. “I could not get out of here if there was an emergency,” she said. “I don’t feel safe.”
