An Airdrie family was lucky to avoid a potentially fatal situation on Oct. 30 after a boiler leak filled their home with carbon monoxide (CO), according to Deputy Fire Chief Garth Rabel.
“They were very lucky,” Rabel said. “It was a positive outcome and we’re very grateful for that. There’s no fooling around with carbon monoxide.”
The home had no working CO detectors, according to Rabel.
According to Rabel, six firefighters from the Airdrie Fire Department responded to the scene along with EMS.
The Orsted family had gone to bed in their home on Morris Crescent S.E., according to dad, Dorien.
“I went to bed around midnight, with a headache,” Orsted said. “Around 1 a.m., my wife and I heard a bump. We have two dogs so we thought the gate holding them in the laundry room might have fallen so we just ignored it.”
Just fifteen minutes later, Orsted said his youngest daughter, Ashlea, 10, knocked on their bedroom door complaining of feeling sick. He and his wife told her to come in to bed with them.
“My wife told (my daughter) to go turn off the light in the hallway and when she did, she fell over and just collapsed,” Orsted said.
Orsted said he thought maybe some pumpkins the family had carved a couple of days early were emitting an odour that was making them feel sick so went downstairs to throw them out.
“As soon as I got out of bed, I could barely stand up and was staggering around,” he said. “I managed to get downstairs and got the pumpkins thrown out.”
But a call from his wife prompted Orsted to head back upstairs where he said he found Ashlea lying on her back in the hallway. She was throwing up and her eyes were rolling back in her head.
Orsted said he then saw his 12-year-old daughter, Rhianna, lying on the floor in the bathroom.
He called 911 and said the dispatcher told them to get out of the house immediately and that it could be CO.
Orsted’s son Aidan, 14, was awake in bed with a headache when his father said he went to go get him.
“He couldn’t even walk. He’d go two steps and he’d fall,” Orsted said. “We tried carrying him. He’s pretty big.”
Once the family got outside, Orsted said the ambulance showed up.
“They got us all into the ambulance and on oxygen and another ambulance and a fire truck showed up,” he said.
Firefighters went into the home, according to Orsted and found the CO level to be at 600 parts per million (ppm).
“The safe exposure limits for CO are very low,” Rabel said. “Alarms will go off at 12 ppm. The level was 600 ppm in the home, and that’s the level at which people start getting sick.”
Orsted said EMS checked his CO levels and found he had 44 per cent CO in his blood which he was told was “(very) bad”.
“At the time, I didn’t realize. I had a headache and felt sick but I didn’t realize I was in mortal danger,” he said.
“EMS told me ‘you can’t be that high; this is serious stuff. Most people when they get into the fifties are starting to die.’”
Orsted said he and his wife, Debra, were taken to the Foothills Medical Centre while the three kids were taken to the Alberta Children’s Hospital (ACH) in Calgary. All were placed on oxygen, hooked up to electrocardiogram machines and monitored until their CO levels came down.
“The doctor told us one more hour and you guys wouldn’t have made it,” Orsted said.
The family pets, including the two dogs and a hamster, were also removed from the home by firefighters and have suffered no lasting effects, according to Orsted.
Orsted said he and Debra were finally released at 8 a.m. and were able to make their way to the ACH with the help of staff at the Foothills, who provided them with some sweatshirts to wear and money for a cab. The entire family made their way home at 10 a.m. on Oct. 31.
“We were all just suffering (with headaches) in silence and thought we’d ride it out and just go to sleep,” Orsted said.
“The doctor said if we had gone to sleep we wouldn’t have woken up. You’ve got to be thankful your daughter knocked on your door and said ‘I’m sick.’”
Orsted said he immediately went out and purchased a set of CO detectors for the home.
“When we moved into this home two years ago, the person we bought it from had three or four fire extinguishers in the house, and a dozen smoke and heat detectors, so my wife and I made the assumption there were CO detectors,” Orsted said. “We test the detectors and they work but they obviously weren’t for CO.”
Rabel said he and other members of the Airdrie Fire Department visited the Orsted’s home and other homes in the neighbourhood on Oct. 31 to check for detectors.
“We went door-to-door to about a dozen houses,” Rabel said.
“We let people know what had occurred. We want to make people feel comfortable in their home. It’s a program we’ve implemented, to go back to communities in crisis. When you put lights on the street in the middle of the night, there are questions people like to have answered.”
The Alberta Building Code (2006) requires all new residential buildings or attached service garages that contain an appliance that uses fuel – e.g. gas fireplace, furnace, gas stove – to have CO detectors.
“What (builders are) typically doing is putting a combination smoke/CO detector on the ceiling,” Rabel said. “There is some safety being engineered into homes much like smoke detectors initially were.”
