Jasper County, IN – A Rensselaer man died Monday night and Jasper County Sheriff’s deputies said flooding and power outages may have been factors.
Jasper County witnessed many power outages after Monday’s storm and most of them since have been repaired.
Emergency Management Director Karen Wilson said a lot of the power outages were from trees falling onto power lines.
We had icing on the trees, which caused the power lines also to become iced, said Wilson. So, we had a lot of branches falling off trees and power lines going down.
A 61-year-old Rensselaer man died after running a generator with little ventilation during the power outage.
Jasper County Sheriff Terry Risner said his department received the 911 call from the man’s wife just before 11:00 p.m. Monday.
The victim was working on a generator and had not returned in to the residence before being checked upon, said Risner. That’s when the victim was found unresponsive and not breathing.
Risner said when deputies arrived the man was passed out in his garage from carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s reported that the man had only opened the walk-in door to his garage and not the large garage door, leaving little ventilation.
Gas power generator puts out a lot of carbon monoxide fumes, simply because it’s obviously a small aired cooled engine, explained Risner.
Risner said it’s important to only run generators in an open environment because of how much carbon monoxide they can emit.
But power outages weren’t the only damage Jasper County sustained from Monday’s storm. Jasper County Highway Department’s Office Manager Jean Witherington said look out for road closures.
We have about a dozen roads that are closed due to high water, said Witherington. There is signage up at all those roads and we encourage people to definitely not try to ever go through any water where there are signs up.
Witherington said County Road 225 North between 75 East and 250 East is predicted to be closed the rest of winter by the highway department. They believe the flooding is so bad, the road will only ice over and stay that way.
Wilson said it’s not the worst storm they’ve seen.
This happens every time so this isn’t a big event for Jasper County right now, said Wilson.