By Sarah Lehr

August 31, 2013. The date is unobtrusively located on the little-noticed Certificate of Operation in the elevator located in Peirce Hall. Next to the date reads, “Certificate Expired Date.”

To the casual observer of Kenyon’s elevator inspection certificates, there might be reason to fear the safety of many campus elevators. Currently, there are 22 in-use elevators on Kenyon property; some of these are accessible to general passengers and some are intended only for freight. Nine of the elevators intended for passengers display outdated safety certifications, most of which expired this past summer in July or August.

Luckily for Kenyon’s stair-averse, all the elevators are actually certified through June or July of 2014. Kenyon’s elevator inspector, employed by the State of Ohio, stipulates that Maintenance keep an original of all current elevator certifications on file and that Maintenance workers display a copy of every certification in the elevators themselves, but Maintenance neglected to hang up the current copies.

“It’s a big campus. There are a lot of little details,” Director of Facility Operations Greg Widener said of the oversight. “No one is harmed by not having these [current certification copies] in place.

“It’s something that should be followed through [on],” Widener acknowledged. “Ultimately the ownership of this lies in my department’s hands.”

The inspector responsible for checking the elevators came to campus on Tuesday, Nov. 12, and he is expected to finish his rounds sometime today. He will likely stick Kenyon with a minor infraction because of its failure to display up-to-date certification information in all locations. This infraction will have no real consequences, as long as Maintenance swaps out the outdated certificates for current ones within 30 days.

In short, while some students maintain that ghosts are a serious menace to Kenyon elevators, mechanical dangers are a non-issue. Current certification information for all Kenyon elevators can be found on the Ohio Department of Commerce website.

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