Elevator technicians spent several hours yesterday morning freeing people from 50 elevators in Makiki, Waikiki, Kapahulu and Ala Moana, but said a malfunction in the reporting system delayed responses in some cases.

Ron Higa of Mitsubishi Elevators & Escalators and Wally Higa of ThyssenKrupp Elevator, who are not related, said there was an apparent breakdown in their companies' reporting systems, which are designed to forward weekend, holiday and off-hour trouble calls to an answering service on the Mainland. The calls were not forwarded and there was no one to answer the phone at their respective company offices yesterday morning.

"There were delays ... and I'm sure all the companies will have meetings to look at what happened," Wally Higa said. Ron Higa called it a major problem.

Most hotels have backup generators but it took Ron Higa 45 minutes, which is longer than usual, to get two people out of an elevator at the Sheraton Waikiki. "The (generator) power was up but there was a door malfunction because someone tried to pry it open," Ron Higa said.

Wally Higa got one man who was stuck between the sixth and seventh floors out of a Kaka'ako-area condominium elevator and went to assist of a couple of other cases.

The Honolulu Fire Department received 50 calls yesterday to assist people stuck in elevators in a 3 1/2-hour period, said HFD spokesman Capt. Frank Johnson.

The majority of calls were between 7:30 and 10:30 a.m. and there were no injuries reported, Johnson said. By 8:30 a.m., nearly half of the department's 55 companies were out on various calls for service, he added.

"The incidents at that time (8:30 a.m.) were power-outage related and most of those were for people stuck in elevators," Johnson added.

Fire Capt. Kekoa Faurot's Pawa'a ladder company came on duty at 8 a.m. and hit the road running.

"We caught seven, that's an unusually high number," Faurot said of the stuck-in-elevator calls, which took his company from high rises on Pensacola Street to hotels in Waikiki.

Waikiki Fire Capt. Gerald Komine's engine company had only one call, to a Lewers Street condominium where a man was trapped in an express elevator that only goes from the first to 15th-floor penthouse.

"He was stuck at about the fifth floor," Komine said, "so we had to wait for a (private elevator company) technician to come and bring him up."

Reach Rod Ohira at rohira@honoluluadvertiser.com.