Fix It! Oʻahu Patients Hobble Up Stairs To Doctor’s Office
Patients have been without an elevator at a Honolulu medical building for months.
As he left his doctor’s appointment in the Liliha Medical Building, Jose Espejo came out of the stairwell and stopped by the elevator in the basement parking garage.
It was blocked off with yellow barriers and “Do Not Enter” signs. A printed notice taped next to the button that people used to use to call their automatic ride up and down said: “Elevator Out Of Order. Please Use Stairs.”
How long has this been going on? More than a year, said Espejo, whose doctor’s office is on the third floor. Other patients said the same thing.
“It’s bad,” Espejo said. “It’s too hard to walk, especially with my knee problem. And sometimes I get gout too.”
On the second floor landing — still on his way up — Benny Stevens stopped to talk story about the elevator that goes nowhere.
It was such a problem for his mother, who has high blood pressure and finds the stairs too taxing, that they were thinking of getting her a new primary care physician, he said.
“That would be difficult, but we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do,” Stevens said.
His mother’s doctor had arranged for telemedicine visits, he said, but that didn’t feel like a satisfactory long-term solution.
The owner of 1712 Liliha St. – identified in property records as Yoshida, Magoichi TRS – could not be reached and tenants Primary Care Clinic of Hawaii and Cataract and Vision Center declined to comment. But the building’s manager promised relief is around the corner.
“They had to change some of the equipment out, and that’s been completed,” Geoffrey Suzuki of the real estate sales and management company Colliers Hawaii said. He said the agency that signs off on elevator maintenance work, safety and code enforcement — the Boiler and Elevator Inspection Branch of the Hawaiʻi Occupational Safety and Health Division — is due to inspect the elevator Friday.
It has taken so long to resolve the problem, Suzuki said, because of a dispute between the building’s owners and the elevator vendor that ultimately led to a new vendor being brought in.
The repair involved the installation of a new jack cylinder and a PVC-lined double bottom cylinder, said Chavonnie Ramos, public information officer at the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations, which houses the Occupational Safety and Health Division.
Who Is Responsible?
The manager of 1712 Liliha St., the Liliha Medical Building, is Geoffrey Suzuki of Colliers Hawaii. His office number is 808-524-2666.
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