CCTV footage uploaded to YouTube shows the horrifying moment a lift malfunctioned in Chile and rocketed up a building badly injuring the passenger inside.

Entering a lift comes with a faint sense of foreboding for many of us, such is its claustrophobic confines and lurching vertical trajectory, yet despite there being a word for the fear of buttons (koumpounophobia) there isn’t actually a term for this fairly common phobia.

Those who experience it won’t be heartened by the video below however, which sees 31-year-old José Vergara Acevedo frantically hammering the elevator’s buttons as it hurtles up the shaft of a building in Bustamante Community Park in Providencia, Chile.

A technical problem prevented the doors from closing and saw the lift pick up speeds of 80kmh as it passed 31 floors in 15 seconds.

The CCTV video ends with Acevedo hitting the building’s roof, with Emol Chile reporting that he suffered head and leg injuries.

The elevator was in the Tower B building of the complex, which was apparently finished just eight months ago.

-Independent

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