news story / By Heidi Walters

Troubled Times At Silvercrest

Elderly and disabled residents struggle to regain their balance after a series of disasters

(Aug. 21, 2008)  On July 21, around noon, Silvercrest resident Kathleen Buchanan was preparing to distribute cat food to fellow cat owners in her apartment complex. She was waiting outside the cargo elevator on the ground floor as another resident, David Kelly, rode his electric scooter on ahead of her. Suddenly the elevator began to rise, although the doors were still open and Kelly’s scooter wasn’t all the way in.

“I’m yelling, ‘David, get out of the chair,’” Buchanan said, sitting in a coffee shop several weeks later. “He’s yelling, ‘I can’t move!’ He goes, ‘I can’t breathe!’”

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The scooter rose until it was crushed between the elevator floor and the second floor. Buchanan said she yelled again to Kelly, and he told her he was out of the chair and on the elevator floor. He wanted his oxygen, he told her. “He said, ‘I’m going to die here,’” she said. She told him she was going for help. First she ran into a volunteer, she said, who didn’t think it’d be OK to pull the fire alarm. Buchanan then found one of the management staff — who, Buchanan accuses, tried to deal with the elevator herself before calling the fire department. (Last Friday the staff member denied that she’d delayed calling the fire department.)

Buchanan went back to talk to Kelly.

Fire engines arrived, and an ambulance, and eventually an Otis Elevator repairman who, according to the Eureka Fire Department’s report on the incident, manually lowered the hydraulic elevator by bleeding the lift cylinder. Kelly was taken to the hospital.

Silvercrest is a 150-unit low-income complex for elderly and disabled people. The green, five-story building, close to the Long’s shopping center on Myrtle, is owned by the Salvation Army and run by its Silvercrest Management Department. Residents’ rent is partially subsidized by HUD. Buchanan said she thinks Silvercrest management hasn’t been responsive to residents. And, in the past few weeks, several other residents of Silvercrest have shared similar complaints with the Journal.

They said construction on the building’s exterior has dragged on for a year. Worse, in June, a beloved maintenance supervisor who’d been at Silvercrest ever since the building was built, 27 years ago, was fired — with police officers on hand during the process, said residents; management offered no explanation. It upset a lot of people. Resident Georgia Bednar circulated a petition stating objection to the firing, which 45 residents signed, and mailed it with a letter to local, regional and top management. Then a new property manager came on board — some residents said he’s hard to communicate with. And then the courtesy wheelchairs that used to be parked in the lobby for people returning from the hospital to use were discarded.

And on July 4, just after a celebratory luncheon, a hot water pipe broke in the boiler room, on the roof. Bednar was helping another resident clean up after the luncheon. “And then I walked out into a pool of water,” she said.

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