Westerville, OH – Darrel Grumman didn’t know it at the time, but slowly his woodshop was becoming a health hazard.Unknown to him, his propane heater was leaking inside a closed garage.”I was down there for maybe two hours and when I got upstairs I noticed I was kind of dizzy,” Grumman recalls.
He says he wasn’t too concerned, so he went to bed, only to be awoken by his daughter.”When I plugged in her nightlight and gave her a kiss goodnight, I stood up and I was super dizzy.I was like ‘what the heck is going on?'”
His wife Alexandria could hear him in the bathroom bumping into things.She found him stumbling in the hallway and he eventually collapsed into her.”I told him ‘Darrel, Darrel, you have to stay awake.If you get on the floor, I can’t pick you up!'”
When the fire department arrived, they told Grumman the carbon monoxide reading in the home was 107.Expert say death is possible at a reading of 150.
Darrel says the fire department told him if he had slept another hour, it was possible he would not have woken up, “If my daughter had not of woken up because she was afraid of the dark, he probably wouldn’t be here,” adds Alexandria.
Now, the family has four carbon monoxide detectors and their days of using propane heaters appear to be over.
Doctors told the Grumman’s that their daughters had very low levels of CO, which is surprising since their bedrooms sit right above the garage where their dad was working with the heater.