New Castle, PA – A carbon monoxide incident at a local apartment complex could have been disastrous, but tragedy was averted yesterday afternoon by a small yellow detection device on an ambulance worker’s bag.
About 60 residents were forced to leave their apartments at Vista South, a South Mercer Street senior citizens apartment complex on the city’s South Side, shortly after 10:30 a.m. Tuesday. The evacuees safely returned to their quarters about two hours later.
The New Castle Fire Department and Medevac Ambulance initially responded to a call about a patient with chest pain around 10:25 a.m., according to assistant city fire chief Mike Kobbe. Medevac personnel were first on scene, and a carbon monoxide monitor on the first-in bag of the paramedic indicated the problem, he said.
Kobbe said three floors of residents the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors were evacuated and sent to the first-floor lobby amid safety concerns after the medics’ and firefighters’ carbon monoxide monitors detected levels of the potentially deadly, odorless gas on the top three floors.
Emergency medical responders from Medevac ambulance checked the residents. Medevac and Noga ambulances transported two to the hospital with high blood pressure and one had trouble breathing, Kobbe said.
He said that prolonged exposure to the gas could have made a lot of the residents sick, or even could have been fatal, had it not been detected so early. And had the incident occurred during the night while people were sleeping, “there could have been a real problem,” he said.
Kobbe credited Medevac for vigilantly changing the batteries in its monitors regularly so that they were operable when they responded, and the problem was detected right away.
“Good preventive maintenance of them kept the problem from getting any worse,” he said.
Kobbe pointed out that previous to yesterday’s incident, there were no carbon monoxide detectors in the 100-unit, six-floor building, “but they have them now.”
A third-party email representing property manager Shannon Saks verified that carbon monoxide detectors had been installed yesterday afternoon on every floor of the building, which is owned Tryko Partners of New Jersey.
The email said about 40 people were removed from the apartments during the incident and stayed in the lobby, which was unaffected.
The email said the problem stemmed from a blocked flue in the hallway ducts on the affected floors.
Kobbe said the malfunctioning boiler part resulted in 500 parts per million of carbon monoxide filling the furnace room, a level that is toxic in the first five minutes of exposure, Kobbe said.
The gas had risen to the upper levels of the building through the forced air system for those floors, he said, and there was no detection of it on the lower three levels.
D.J. Hannon & Sons, a plumbing and heating company on Long Avenue, promptly responded and replaced the faulty part. The city firefighters returned and checked carbon monoxide levels in the building, “and there are no issues now,” Kobbe said late yesterday afternoon, adding, “The boiler is fully functional.”
He said there are 24 apartments on each floor.
“Everyone returned to their apartments without much trouble,” Kobbe said.
He explained that seven years ago, Emergency Medical Services had an initiative to provide the small yellow passive carbon monoxide monitors to paramedics and EMTs to clip onto their first-in bags. The monitors give off an alert to let them know it’s dangerous going into a building.
The batteries in the devices last two to three years, and Medevac had changed the batteries in theirs at least twice, Kobbe said.
He noted that 100 parts per million is a level of carbon monoxide where there are symptoms of headaches, nausea and disorientation, and “that’s what we found on the fifth and sixth floors.”
With 50 ppm, one can have up to 8 hours of maximum exposure without symptoms.
At 400 ppm, carbon monoxide is life-threatening after three hours. The 500 ppm level in the boiler room was cause for the firefighters to go in wearing self-contained breathing apparatus, Kobbe said.
On the toxicity charge, at 800 ppm, exposure causes dizziness and seizures, and death can occur in less than an hour, he said.
The responders were on scene at the apartment building for more than two hours, having cleared there at 12:38 p.m.
“It was a happy story, because it could have been a lot worse and we were able to avert disaster by solving the problem early,” Kobbe said, adding, “It was scary, very scary.
“If it wasn’t for those carbon monoxide alarms that the region pushed, things could have been a lot worse,” he said. “It was fate. Everything worked out very well.”
“It’s absolutely important to keep the batteries changed in smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors,” Kobbe added.