(Photo by Meghan Hess)

This post has been updated with the number of people who were evacuated.

One park ranger and 18 visitors got stuck on an elevator about halfway up to the top of the Washington Monument this afternoon. They were all safely evacuated, along with another 23 people or so who were at the observation deck.

The monument is closed as elevator technicians conduct inspections and make any possible repairs, National Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst said in a statement.

A contractor inadvertently damaged the elevator control box in February, leading to a four-day closure, and a series of failures last spring and summer drew the concern of Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton.

It is unclear what caused today’s outage.