history of CO awareness

[dinkelja]

I am curious about the history of Carbon Monoxide awareness (residential) in the USA. I am a young firefighter. We receive CO alarm activations year around, nearly all false alarms / malfunctioning detectors. The Red-Cross has distributed CO alarms free for about the last 7 years (literally like candy). Which isn't a bad thing, okay; but from another standpoint, our units are out-of-service a-lot! Recently they have changed to a more reliable unit. The few serious events involved people whom accidentally left their car running in the garage. Anyways, when did the scare of CO in the home develop? 1990? Did people just drop dead, unexplained, before that?

 

[mbeychok]

dinkelja:

From the online encylcopedia known as the "Wikipedia":

The toxic properties of CO were first thoroughly investigated by the French physiologist Claude Bernard around 1846. He poisoned dogs with the gas, and noticed that their blood was more rutilant in all the vessels. 'Rutilant' is a French word, but also has an entry in English dictionaries, meaning ruddy, shimmering, or golden. However, it was translated at the time as crimson, scarlet, and now is famously known as 'cherry pink'.

When I went took chemistry in high school and university (1938-1943), we knew about the toxicity of carbon monoxide. So you can be assured that the toxicity was many, many decades before 1990.



Milton Beychok
(Visit me at www.air-dispersion.com)
.

 

[SeattlePioneer]

I was a repairman for a gas utility for a number of years, and investigated hundreds of complaints of carbon monoxide hazards.

The most people I ever packed off to a hospital from one call was eight. That was a restaurant where the manager had turned off the ventilator over the range to prevent a lot of heated air from being exhausted outside and cooling off the restaurant.

Unfortunately, several burners on the range were dirty and making carbon monoxide. People in the kitchen were being poisoned as a result.


I've seen people get poisoned off one dirty pilot light on a gas range.

Since the specific gravity of carbon monoxide is almost exactly that of air, carbon monoxide tends to hang around for hours, rather than dispersing. People who warm up their cars on a cold day, even outdoors, can create enough CO inside or against a house to set off CO alarms two or three hours later.

Personally, I don't have a CO alarm, because my ability to evaluate equipment and hazards makes the alarm unnecessary, and I find the false positives annoying.

After a recent storm here that left 500,000 people without electrical power, often for several days, a number of people were killed by carbon monoxide. Most commonly these were immigrants using charcoal indoors, but also people using electric generators outdoors where the exhaust gasses infiltrated the house.


In short, while rare, these problems can be real, and can be fatal.

 

[danw2]

Back when retailers started offering home CO monitors, there must have been a breakthrough in the design of the sensor itself that brought the cost down to pennies instead of dollars. Because prior to that, the cost of manufacture of the just the CO sensor used in industrial grade portable monitors (sniffers) and was higher than the retail cost of a home CO alarm/monitor. And the difference wasn't economy of scale, it was design.

As to awareness, I heard about CO in public school and in safety presentations from Boy Scouts. I seem to recall that the newspapers quoted medical examiners as attributing deaths from sitting in running automobiles in closed garages to CO.

But institutional respect for CO outside gas distribution utilities was minimal, in my personal experience. In the late 1970's, I worked one summer in a very large New England GM dealer's service department as a line mechanic. The first day there, the mechanic working in the bay next to me warned me not to use the flexible exhaust hoses, because the exhaust fan for the exhausting system didn't work.

I naively asked the shop manager about getting the blower fixed. He replied that he'd "look into it" and when that went nowhere, I finally called the regional OSHA office only to discover that they couldn't spell monoxide without help and could have cared less. It wasn't their job. I couldn't even get specifics about how to make a "formal" complaint.

I've always wondered how much CO those indoor Japanese fuel oil catalytic heaters, so popular in wake of the oil crisis of 1979, generated. Given that there was always a lingering smell of kerosene, an "odorless, tasteless gas could well go undetected, but I don't recall news stories about deaths so they must have produced negligible CO.