Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

Unfortunately, I expected to see more of these tragic cases in the wake of Hurricane Irene, which knocked out power last weekend in a swath from North Carolina to Maine.     

An elderly couple died of carbon monoxide poisoning last Tuesday in their summer home in Raymond, Maine, with the lethal gas coming from an emergency generator, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

http://articles.philly.com/2011-09-01/news/30029230_1_carbon-monoxide-generator-summer-home

Lewis Somers, 85, and his wife Elizabeth, 84, both from the Lafayette Hill area of Pennsylvania, were discovered in their Sebago Lake home by one of their neighbors Tuesday.

Hurricane Irene had knocked out power in the couple’s lakeside summer home for more than 48 hours, and they were running a propane generator in their basement to provide electricity, The Inquirer reported.

I’m sure that many residents of the East Coast had generators going when they went off the power grid because of the devastation of Irene. Accidental carbon monoxide deaths caused by emergency generators were a second tragedy waiting to happen.

It’s especially heartbreaking in the case of the Somerses, because authorities said that their generator was connected to an exterior exhaust system. But that ventilation system had deteriorated, and that led to the two deaths, according to the Morning Sentinel of Maine.    

http://www.onlinesentinel.com/news/faulty-gas-vent-blamed-for-deaths_2011-08-31.html

The local newspaper reported that although the generator was a high-quality model, it had been installed when the summer house was built way back in the 1980s. The generator had a system to take the exhaust through the basement wall to the outside of the building. 

But authorities told the Morning Sentinel that the metal hose used to carry and vent the generator’s fumes had become cracked, and that the underground 55-gallon drum that the hose connected to had partially collapsed. Those factors could have made the carbon monoxide fumes back up into the basement, ultimately killing the elderly couple.

There are two life-saving lessons to be had here. You should periodically have appliances that operate on fuel of any kind checked periodically. And you should have carbon monoxide detectors in your home.

Police could not find any carbon monoxide detectors in the Somers’ Maine house.

Lewis Somers was an entrepreneur, millionaire and philanthropist. I’m sure he and his wife will be missed.      

Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
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