May 24, 2009 – A prank call to 911 on Saturday started a sequence of unfortunate events that led to elevator service in the west residential tower at Marina City being shut down for more than three hours.

At about 4:00 p.m., Chicago Fire Department responded to a 911 call that turned out to be a hoax. However, according to a letter to residents from condo association president Donna Leonard, “when CFD locked off the west tower elevators, they inadvertently broke one of their elevator keys in one of the elevators.”

This prevented all of the elevators in the west tower from returning to normal service. ThyssenKrupp Elevator, the company that maintains elevators at Marina City, disabled the broken lock and got the elevators working again at about 7:15 p.m.

According to Leonard, the prank caller “indicated that there was a fire in a specific apartment” in the west tower. She says she was told by CFD personnel that the Chicago Police Department had traced the 911 call to a cell phone.

Fire department spokesperson Larry Langford confirmed the call was “not bona fide” but he did not believe the Chicago Police Department would be investigating. “They rarely do. Unless you get a rash of 911 calls from someplace, it just goes down as a ‘false’ or ‘malicious false’.”