So I was reading about the ice storms in Kentucky, which are apparently the worst they’ve had in a LONG time. Very dangerous stuff. We got some of it in OH, but it only lasted a couple of days for most of us (of really bad ice, I mean). But this quote stuck out in the article about Louisville:
Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson said four people had died in his city. Two elderly people and their special-needs adult child died because of an “improperly vented” generator, and another person died after using a charcoal grill as a heater for the house.
Now, I’m not sure if grills even bother to put “for outside use only”. I bet they do. But they shouldn’t have to. This is obvious. I mean the guy was burning charcoal inside his house, without a chimney! That’s Darwin Award worthy. The generator issue is a bit more reasonable, I guess. But even there, you are talking about a gas engine, similar to your car. Everyone knows not to run the car with the garage door closed, right? So how does this stuff happen?
Everyone reading this has at one time in their life done something so stupid that they could/should have died from it but by the grace of Tammy Faye Baker they survived.
Yeah, like those stupid people in India that burn insulation off of wiring because they need the money. Don’t they know that insulation contains carcinogens? God, how stupid can they be?
For the thick amongst you: In a city of a half-million, there are going to be some people that either don’t make the connection between grills and toxins, or are desperate enough that they don’t care. We also had a wind storm over the summer that left over 300,000 without power for a week, bet you folks didn’t even hear about that, did you? Of course, a taxi has a fenderbender in New York and it’s front page news for a month.
I can sort of understand that. I mean, come on, how often do people in apartment buildings have to think about these things? A lot of people have never lived in a house with a visible chimney, nor have had to think about issues like carbon monoxide build-up.
You know when you’re about to do something and you start thinking about all the consequences and safety measures and such that accompany what you’re about to do? Or when you’re about to do something and think “maybe I shouldn’t do this, I don’t fully understand this or know exactly what I’m doing”.
That’s the kind of internal monologue that just didn’t happen here. I know everyone is special to someone else, but you have to look at it statistically. 6,881,621,490 left.
No, wait. They’ve already been replaced ten times over in the time it took me to write this.
That was a strange tangent. No one here is denying these things happen. You are accusing us of being thick, when we know this kind of stuff happens all the time. My question is about how to avoid it.
As for your loss of power, I was reading an article about it, which I linked above. They ARE writing about it, and it IS a national headline. I remember the problem you had over the summer too, yes. You aren’t being ignored.
I remember when I was in college I worked at a hardware store and our most popular hammer was one which actually had instructions on how to use the hammer printed in icons on the side. I always thought that was handy.
The day I saw a phone number for a help hotline on a tube of toothpaste was the day I sort of stopped noticing warning labels. They’re on absolutely everything.
It’s a tough problem because the people who are careless enough to do the really stupid stuff probably aren’t in the habit of carefully reading warning labels.
If you thought you were going to freeze to death, and all you had was a charcoal grill, what would you do? I’d go for the grill if I started getting frostbite, and take my chances.
I nearly killed myself as a young college student in a garage apartment on a cold winter night by shutting all the windows in the deluxe shoebox and running the gas heater all night long. Next day i had the funkiest headache, i could barely breathe, and felt so sick it was all i could do to drive. I spent the next day half asleep under trees in a public park. I never ran the heater again, and just used a crappy electric space heater that took several hours to heat the room.
I knew that carbon monoxide was dangerous but i figured it wouldn’t be bad if i did it for just a few hours…
So which one of you is going to live Hitchhiker’s Guide style?
Personally though I don’t think there’s anything you can do, there is always going to be people that don’t or can’t read, don’t know about the relevant dangers, and who have no ability to think things through.
Using the grill without serious ventillation is just slitting your throat. Anyway, I don’t think people who took reasonable precautions were in danger of freezing to death in this case. The people who died used improper heating, but no one apparently died of hypothermia. I don’t think you can really make the case that this was the person’s only option for survival.
