Tokyo: Authorities in Japan are thinking to arrange toilets facilities in lifts of major buildings in the country.
There are also proposals to install emergency drinking water in such lifts.
This is to help people who may get trapped in lifts during calamities such as earthquakes.
A lot of people were held up in lifts for hours during the recently hit earthquake in Japan.
Officials from the infrastructure ministry were met industry representatives in Japan to discuss the proposals, after being studied the horribleness of the undersea quake and its aftermath, severely suffered by the Japan people recently.
One of their ideas was to install portable toilets in lifts. Such toilets could be featured with a waterproof bag or other absorbent material inside a collapsible cardboard structure.
In the capital, Tokyo, almost 20,000 lifts were stopped after the recent quake, with 14 of them trapped between floors.
In one case, people inside the lift were forced to stay inside for more than an hour before being rescued.
During the devastating earthquake of 2011, some people were trapped in lifts for more than nine hours.
About 60% of Japanese lifts are designed to detect vibrations on earth’s surface and stop at the closest floor before their doors are being opened automatically.
Nowadays, Japan is often shaken by massive earthquakes, but according to seismologists there are high possibilities to have an earth quake at capital Tokyo.
They have also predicted that the quake could be a major one within the coming decades.
This made the Japan government to estimate that as many as 17,000 people could be trapped inside various lifts of the skyline positions in the capital if that devastating calamity happens.

Video on Japan’s emergency toilets in lifts