Carbon monoxide leak threatens family
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A Northern Ireland Housing Executive tenant and her family narrowly escaped serious carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty fire.
Stacey Smith, 22, had only just installed a carbon monoxide detector when four men in her house, including her husband and father, fell ill. When she noticed the counter’s levels were dangerously high, she called the emergency services.
All four received oxygen and were taken to hospital. Mrs Smith’s young children were not present at the time, although firemen later told her they would not have survived more than a couple of hours.
She said: ‘If I hadn’t installed the counter I would have had the girls back home soon after I called at the house. Siyana is just a year old and Nikita is three, and the firemen said that, with their lungs being so small, they wouldn’t have survived for more than an hour or two. We could have died in our beds.’
Fire fighters discovered a glass-fronted fire was the source of the leak.
The Housing Executive issued a statement saying: ‘Housing Executive maintenance staff have visited the tenant in this property today and have arranged for contractors to carry out repairs to the heating system. A problem appears to have occurred yesterday due to an interruption to the water supply to the heating system.
‘The tenant has been provided with temporary heating until the repairs are completed. The Housing Executive apologises for the inconvenience caused to the tenant.’
Inside Housing is running a campaign calling for action to stop preventable deaths from gas and fire. For more on this see our Safe as Houses campaign page.
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Readers' comments (4)
Peter | 15/10/2009 11:27 am
' .... an interruption to water supply to heating system ' caused the carbon monoxide poisoning? This explanation surely cannot be correct, can it? I thought this would be a venting issue, i.e the flue malfunctioned?
Anybody out there can clarify whether this is possible?
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Sancho | 15/10/2009 2:13 pm
This story doesn't make any sense. It says the firefighters found the leak was coming from a glass-fronted fire. Why would that have a water supply?
My best guess is that what actually happened was that the heating packed up because of a water problem and they put some old creaky gas fire on to warm themselves up.
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Jim Paton | 15/10/2009 11:00 pm
Doesn't make sense to me either. Was it a glass-fronted fire or central heating system? Either way, it surely has to be a venting issue and I don't understand how an interruption in water supply to a central heating system could cause that.
The problem is probably that the NIHE statement was made by some PR person who doesn't have a clue and doesn't understand what they're purporting to explain. My own council has perpetrated some hilarious howlers on environmental issues for exactly this reason.
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Jon | 16/10/2009 0:54 am
Peter, tho' not a gas engineer you may be right ... probably a back-boiler unless tenant damage/compo related or long-term leak on fire/back-boiler/flue. Sancho, as I'm sure you know any gas fire has to be safety-checked annually ... possibly another concealed flue/chimney/cowl related defect. Thankfully no one damaged. Hope factual causal update after gas engineer report forthcoming via Inside Housing?
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