Lexington, KY – A Lexington woman checked herself into the hospital Sunday night with a headache. It turns out her apartment on Patchen Drive was slowly filling up with carbon monoxide.
“The furnace was malfunctioning and generating carbon monoxide and actually a small gas leak,” Lexington Fire Department Major Trevor Cox said.
Lexington firefighters say symptoms of CO poisoning include headaches, dizziness and feeling tired. They say if not acted upon immediately carbon monoxide poisoning can quickly set in.
“Carbon monoxide is colorless, odorless, you can’t smell it, you can’t detect it,” Major Cox said. “You have to have a carbon monoxide detector.”
Cox says an investment in a CO detector could prove to be live saving in the event of a leak. He says had the woman not gone to the hospital, firefighters could have been responding to a much more tragic call.
“If it got real cold and it called on that furnace to run a lot more there’s a potential it could have filled up to a fatal level,” Major Cox said.