Visitors to 875 N. Michigan Avenue in Chicago, known from 1969 until last year as the John Hancock Center, love to go to the 94th floor observation deck, have dinner at "the 95th" or go to the bar on the 96th floor (that's what I typically do.)
On Friday, riders on the elevator preparing to go from the 95th floor to the ground level got a terrifying scare when a hoist cable snapped and their elevator car plummeted from the 95th floor to the 11th. They were then trapped for 3 hours. No one was hurt, and thanks to the fact that several hoist ropes hold up an elevator car, the others are able to carry the weight. Engineers like to call that "redundancy"; I call it a life-saver. Firefighters had to cut through an 11th floor wall to get to the elevator shaft and rescue those trapped inside.
Video below is from CBS-2 in Chicago, you can also check out more on the story here.
Can you imagine being in that elevator when that happened??