East Windsor, NJ – Fire chief Kevin Brink said it was a scene that stuck with him.

Amid the wind and rain of Hurricane Sandy, he and a crew of East Windsor firefighters were dispatched to a first-floor apartment in town for a carbon monoxide detector alert.

When firefighters arrived and entered the building, their meters went haywire — showing around 300 carbon monoxide parts per million. An optimal reading is basically zero, Brink said.

The power was out and crews shone their flashlights about in an attempt to locate the source.

“And then we saw a barbecue grill in there,” he said. “We’re thinking, ‘Oh my God, what were these people thinking, they could have killed themselves.’”

In this case, no one was killed. But carbon monoxide inhalation during power outages caused by Hurricane Sandy has been cited in five New Jersey deaths, including a 59-year-old Trenton woman found in a house where a generator was left running overnight in a basement. Seven of her family members were hospitalized.

“It is a big problem, and here’s the deal: If people don’t have electricity, they don’t get the press releases we send out,” said Bill Kramer, the state’s acting fire marshal.

Throughout the year and leading up to Sandy, his department sent out warnings and guidelines about the proper use of generators. But the message clearly didn’t reach some, said Kramer, also the acting director of the Division of Fire Safety.

“No one is putting it (a generator) in their basement to intentionally kill their family,” he said. “It’s obvious they just don’t realize it and it is a shame.”

Between 1999 and 2010, nearly 600 generator-related carbon monoxide deaths were reported across the nation, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

In East Windsor, Brink said there were about 23 calls for carbon monoxide detectors going off. Some were caused by power outages and bad batteries, while others were the real deal, where the deadly gas was present.

“We were getting them from all over town,” he said. “A lot of times, these things were coming in at midnight, or 1 a.m., and if there’s not a functioning detector, there’s a chance you don’t wake up.”

For 90 percent of the calls the department received, the homes had working carbon monoxide detectors, but there were instances in which the alarms in abutting apartments had gone off as well, Brink said. Generators need to be at least 10 feet away from a house or dwelling with the exhaust facing downwind, fire officials said.

There were cases both locally and statewide, where the exhaust was pointing inside, or the generator was placed right near a basement or first floor window, which could also set a house on fire if close enough, fire officials said.

In Robbinsville, crews responded to fewer than 10 calls, said deputy fire chief Dan Schaffener.

“There weren’t a tremendous amount of them, but the ones that did could have resulted in serious issues,” Schaffener said. “They’re worried about the storm, the effect on their house, worried about getting electricity back, but they’re not thinking things out completely.”