Imagine having to take 14 flights of stairs every time you want to enter or leave your home.

For Claire Mosher, that’s what life has been like since last Friday.

Mosher lives at 294 Chandler Drive, a 16-storey high-rise building.

Last Thursday, alarms started going off in the building. Then the fire department showed up.

The problem soon became apparent. The sprinkler system had gone off, and the tenth floor had flooded.

“It sounded like Niagara Falls, with the water going in the shafts,” Mosher says.

Elevator repair crews have been at 294 Chandler every day since. Because the damage is so extensive, they haven’t been able to get the system back up and running.

“They’ve been telling us they don’t know when the elevators will be (repaired),” Mosher says.

“It has caused a lot of chaos.”

For Mosher, that sense of chaos is present every time she tries to navigate the stairs to and from her 15th-floor apartment.

Battling arthritis and asthma, she carries an inhaler on each trip and stops as often as she needs to.

“It’s hard – very hard,” she says.

Jason Charlick lives one floor above Mosher. He estimates that he’s been using the staircases five times a day since Thursday – mostly to take his dog outside.

He says many residents are concerned that they haven’t been given any concrete information about when the elevators will be back in service.

“I’ve heard anything from a couple days all the way up to a couple months,” he says.

“The team here has been doing what they can, but it’s not enough.”

The company working on the elevator repairs said they hoped they would be able to have one elevator back in service by late Monday. The owner of the apartment building did not return requests for comment before this story was published.

With reporting by Stu Gooden