Some days I read shit I just cannot believe. Last night in a Rochester suburb, a man died of carbon monoxide poisoning in his sleep, but his teenage children luckily survived:
The teens also told authorities that the family had a fire in a fireplace the previous evening, he said. They also told deputies that two carbon monoxide detectors had sounded Monday evening, but that the family was not clear at the time why the detectors were sounding and removed them from the house, Helfer said.
If you don’t have a CO alarm, go buy and install one today, and listen to the fucking thing if it goes off.
Xboxershorts
Colorless and odorless, if that CO alarm goes off, open the windows and call 911 and leave the house.
BGinCHI
People have CO alarms and when they go off they unplug them. Then they die of CO poisoning.
And we wonder why folks believe what’s on Fox News.
Bnut
I always thought the alarm meant to hit it with a broomstick till it stopped…..
Culture of Truth
Without criticizing this particular family, that’s the problem with so many security fixes, particularly ones dependent on elaborate technology – the human factor.
An airport can have a sophisticated RFID ID system securing whole areas of the facility, but if it’s too annoying for the baggage handlers or the retail workers, they just prop a door open. I’m sure everyone knows of similar examples of human workarounds inconvenient barriers.
Tom Levenson
It makes me sick to my stomach to hear stories like this.
Good morning, all.
twiffer
granted, CO poisoning does make you stupid. still, it’s best to listen to those things. and leave the damn flue open on the chimney.
Culture of Truth
Of course, the problem with some technologies is they over-alert and are therefore rightly ingnored. Car alarms, for example.
JCT
It was probably Obama’s fault.
stuckinred
I lived out in the country here in Georgia some years back. About 2 am on morning my neighbor was yelling from the yard “help, help, the house is on fire”. I threw on my clothes and ran over there. I could see the smoke coming out of the upstairs window. When I went in the door his wife and daughter were sitting there watching tv. I said, “where’s Joe”? They said, “oh he’s upstairs”! They were from Alabama. . .
PurpleGirl
I don’t have a CO2 alarm. My building has an exemption from the City because it doesn’t have a furnace in the building. In fact, 6 of the 7 buildings in the complex don’t have alarm devices. The apartments in the one building with a furnace do have alarms. (The complex has its own electrical power plant and our steam heat and hot water are co-generation products from the electrical production.)
gbear
They’re going to listen to their heart.
It’s going to tell them what to do.
stuckinred
@gbear:
She may need a lot of love
but she don’t need you
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: In AL that’s called a “house candle.”
Rosalita
@stuckinred:
are you shitting us?
Culture of Truth
Obama is in the pocket of Big CO. The Dems just want grant a monopoly to oxides!
A Duck
Yes, but did they have a legume detector?
People ignore alarms, ore carriers sink, Canuckistani folksingers overstay their welcome, the sun rises . . .
So it goes.
stuckinred
@Rosalita: Nope, ask BGinCHI, it was in Oconee County off Snow’s Mill Road. He knows the area even if he stayed the hell out of there!
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: stuck is correct. Even white people are scared of the white people there.
Tip: “fire” rhymes with “bar.”
change
I present to you the “Religion of Peace!”
Christian woman sentenced to death in Pakistan ‘for blasphemy’
The court heard she had been working as a farmhand in fields with other women, when she was asked to fetch drinking water.
Some of the other women – all Muslims – refused to drink the water as it had been brought by a Christian and was therefore “unclean”, according to Mrs Bibi’s evidence, sparking a row.
The incident was forgotten until a few days later when Mrs Bibi said she was set upon by a mob.
The police were called and took her to a police station for her own safety.
Shahzad Kamran, of the Sharing Life Ministry Pakistan, said: “The police were under pressure from this Muslim mob, including clerics, asking for Asia to be killed because she had spoken ill of the Prophet Mohammed.
“So after the police saved her life they then registered a blasphemy case against her.” He added that she had been held in isolation for more than a year before being sentenced to death on Monday.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/8120142/Christian-woman-sentenced-to-death-in-Pakistan-for-blasphemy.html
sherifffruitfly
Wonder if they weren’t aware that carbon monoxide is odorless, so they were all like “wtf” when the alarm when off, and just got rid of it.
Culture of Truth
It’s also possible the kids did not know that devices were CO detectors.
Also the detectors went off Monday but the news story is from today.
some other guy
@change:
Why stop there? These people are brown, right? So, clearly, this is incontrovertible proof that all darkies are backwards savages.
scav
I don’t need lectures on peace from the crowd that sponsored Ireland.
cleek
@change:
it’s a good thing for your point that no Christians have ever killed anyone!
Citizen_X
@change: Yet another good example of why religion should be kept as far as fucking possible from government, eh, changey?
BGinCHI
@change: You want some pics of Christians burning other Christians at the stake or blowing them up on Easter Sunday?
Oh, I forgot, you’re an idiot. Never mind.
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
@Culture of Truth:Let’s see, a (usually bright) colleague taping her super-ultra-complicated password that includes a mix of letters, numbers and symbols to her monitor. We’re looking into smart cards with dynamically changing passwords now. Of course, people will lose those.
My heart goes out to this family. It may be that the CO2 monitor was in the house when they moved in and they didn’t know what it was for.
BGinCHI
Now I can’t decide whether to make fun of AL and Georgia crackers or changey.
Where’s Neil Young when you need him?
change
@some other guy:
You know who was “brown”? The woman who was killed for “disrespecting” Muhammad.
change
@BGinCHI:
Your point is…?
BGinCHI
@change: Lost on fools.
gene108
CO detectors go nuts for two reasons that I can think of (1) there’s CO building up and (2) the batteries are running low and need to be replaced.
Had a CO detector go nuts and I was trying to figure out why. Finally, decided to read the manual and changed the batteries.
That got things back to normal.
Napoleon
@BGinCHI:
Or murdering them in a church because they are a gynecologist who is willing to perform abortions.
change
Leave it to liberals to conflate race with religion.
Adam Ghadan, the Tokyo Rose of Al Qaeda is a white boy from California, it doesn’t make him any less Muslim.
Not to mention Arabs, Turks, Iranians are all pretty white.
gwangung
@change: Uganda.
change
Liberals: for women’s liberation and freedom unless you’re from the Third World, then you can beat your wife and rape her as a “cultural difference”.
They’re for secularism and free speech, unless the religion is Islam, either because they hate the west even more or because they’re scared shitless of offending Muslims. I’m not sure which.
Alex S.
If they had had multiple alarms the competition between them would have saved their lives.
change
@gwangung:
Obviously you just hate “brown people”.
cckids
Darwin award finalist. That is all.
p.a.
@change: Welcome. It’s always good to have another atheist go public on the stupidity of religion.
some other guy
@change:
So they’ll even turn on their own kind. Just further proof that the inferior savages can’t be trusted!
change
@p.a.:
Yes, all religions are stupid, but some are much more dangerous than others.
Those that think evangelical Christians are just as dangerous as Islamists need to wake the fuck up to reality.
And hey, Evangelical Christians are more dangerous than Quakers or Buddhists.
Joshua
change, for women’s liberation and freedom for the third world because he can use it as a bludgeon to attack the fake liberals in his head.
This woman’s case is unfortunate. I hope she gets some semblance of justice. I hope all people do. But I’m not going to use anecdotes like that as masturbatory fantasies for endless war and the “Middle East as a parking lot.” We’ve been down that road, no good can come of it.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@p.a.: He’s just a Republican troll, and probably Christian. Don’t be fooled.
Culture of Truth
Those villagers condemned that woman based solely on her religion? Indeed that is terrible.
Rosalita
@stuckinred:
guess I’m glad I never ventured too far out of Dunwoody
Mentalfugue
Would be interesting to hear what prompted the 18 year old son and 16 year old daughter to check on their father at 3:40am.
New Yorker
@change:
All the more reason to become an atheist. Also, all the more reason this country should stop pretending Pakistan is an “ally”.
some other guy
@change:
Wait just a minute there. Are you suggesting we can’t make slanderous assumptions about all members of a certain group based on a tiny sample of that group?
Sounds like someone has their head buried in the sand with regard to the True Nature of our mortal enemies.
Culture of Truth
I present to you the “Religion of Peace!”
Is that you talking or the people doing the stoning? It’s hard to tell.
change
@Joshua:
Is that why leftists in Europe are now saying that being against FGM and wife beating is “racism” or “Islamophobia” if the person doing it is Muslim?
Again, it’s difficult to tell if this is because the left has no real principles besides being against western civilization, or if because they’re scared stiff of Islamist reaction.
change
@New Yorker:
Pakistan is an enemy.
Ash Can
@change: Wow! I’m impressed! You sure know your Muslims!
MattR
@change:
The question is dangerous to whom? If not for our military actions, 95% of this country would not be influenced in any way by Islamists. The same cannot be said for evangelical Christians. (BTW, I bring up the military because those who are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan will obviously come into contact with Islamists and their friends and families back here will be affected.)
chopper
@Culture of Truth:
or smoke alarms. my smoke alarm goes off half the time i’m cooking. if the CO alarm goes off, i have to fight the urge to think ‘well shit, it’s just oversensitive’.
sherifffruitfly
@cckids:
You’re not eligible for a Darwin Award if you have kids. That kinda like… defeats the purpose of the award.
change
@MattR:
What military actions were we undertaking on September 11th, 2001?
What military actions did Denmark and Sweden undertake that led to the burning of their embassies and kidnap their tourists?
Why, those genocidal, imperialist, militarist Scandinavians! I guess they had it coming!
scav
small change does tend to rattle a lot, no?
change
And the Dutch. We all know the Dutch are just out to conquer the world and rule an empire, of course they deserve to have members of Parliament assassinated!
cckids
@sherifffruitfly: Ya, forgot that one. Maybe some sort of Hon. Mention?
MattR
@change:
And what percent of our population was actually impacted by the events of 9/11 (freaking out about it does not count)? I strongly doubt it was more than the 5% (15 million people) I indicated.
change
@MattR:
I wonder what percentage of our population would be effected if they got a nuclear bomb and detonated it in, say, I don’t know–San Francisco?
scav
jingle jingle jingle
MattR
@change: And I wonder what percent would be affected if the evangelical Christians got their way and passed the laws they want.
Or if you want to go all the way: I wonder what percent will be affected by climate change after the evangelical Christians block all efforts to mitigate it?
change
@MattR:
Um, abortion would be outlawed and we’d have mandatory prayer in school?
That’s surely just as bad as passing laws making women wear burkas, legalizing polygamy, legalizing FGM, wife beating, having laws that state a woman is worth 1/2 of a man and killing people for “blasphemy”, right?
change
See, these people are just anti-colonial freedom fighters responding to racism, and globalizing hamburger cowboy blah blah blah leftist trope blah blah global south:
http://tinyurl.com/29pqtg2
MattR
@change: Considering none of those other things are even close to occurring in the United States I will say outlawing abortion is much worse. (remember, we are talking about the affect of Islamists on Americans here)
And that assumes that your list of two things is anywhere near complete (which is completely laughable).
Chyron HR
@change:
Looks like they’re your kind of people, change.
I wonder what percentage of our population would be affected if one of the many Timothy McVeigh worshippers in the Tea Party got a nuclear bomb?
some other guy
@change:
And what if they detonated 100 nuclear bombs?! Or a MILLION!!!
We must exterminate the brutes to prevent this doomsday scenario from occurring!
wenchacha
Getting back to the original post before it was douche-jacked, CO can make your thinking foggy. If they thought the detector was a smoke alarm reacting to the fireplace, that might explain the tragedy. Maybe a better alarm system would also have a voice message reminding you that the danger is from CO, not smoke or fire. In addition to the loud alarm sound.
change
@Chyron HR:
They’re talking about classical, European liberalism which we call libertarianism in the US, not American liberalism which is known as Socialism in Europe.
They like Socialists, because Socialists believe they’re just misunderstood freedom fighters fighting white colonial oppression.
change
@Chyron HR:
They’re not talking about American liberalism, but European Classical Liberalism which is known as libertarianism in the US.
Cackalacka
If I may interrupt this helpful on-topic discussion with our new house troll, Change, this topic is actually fairly, well topical for myself.
Yesterday evening, my father shared a story regarding two of my parents friends.
Until last week, they drove a Lexus hybrid, one with a remote starter.
About that ‘until last week’ part: they parked the vehicle in the garage; somehow the car accidentally started (or perhaps they neglected to hit the ‘On/Off’ button after arriving.’ Car was running idle for at least 16 hours, unattended.
Apparently the master bedroom is above the garage. Their family and/or friends did not hear from them the next day. Someone went over there, the wife is dead of monoxide poisoning, and the husband is in critical condition in an oxygen chamber, and the prognosis is grim.
You should already have a monoxide sensor installed. They’re like, what $20 at Home Depot?
If you have a hybrid and a garage, you should probably have more than one monoxide sensor.
Anyway, you are now free to entertain your ongoing productive conversations with change. Who knows, perhaps we can all help this change guy grow a soul?
Chyron HR
@change:
Or maybe they were all just plants!
You know, like the people at the Tea Party rallies with the “KILL NIGGERBONGO” signs?
MattR
To get back on topic: I have seen quite a few CO detector commercials featuring NY Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay who talks about initially ignoring his detector and almost dying as a result. I believe these commercials started airing in conjunction with the New York state law requiring CO detectors that went into affect earlier this year.
Tim I
@stuckinred:
Oh you ‘Bama’ basher, you!
Jeff R.
@gene108:
3rd reason: they’re defective. I had one that was about 3 months old and went off (it was hardwired). I got everyone out of the house and called 911. The fireman went through the house with their sniffers and found nothing. When I called the detector manufacturer to get a replacement, they asked me what I did when it went off. I said I called 911, which was the right answer.
MattR
@Jeff R.: Better that way than the opposite. When I did my condo inspection before closing, I was advised to replace my entire circuit breaker box because that particular company’s products had an issue where they worked fine initially but once you tripped and reset a breaker it would not necessarily retrip properly when there was a legitimate problem.
jrg
This exact thing happened in Raleigh a couple of days ago. Killed the wife, the husband’s in critical condition.
They had one of those “keyless start” cars. It somehow got started in the garage, they went to sleep in their bedroom in another part of the house, and one of them never woke up.
We just bought a Carbon Monoxide detector yesterday.
Lit3Bolt
@jrg: Sounds like someone accidentally and fatally hit the button on their keychain remote. Technology! making it easier to kill yourself since 1876.
MattR
@Lit3Bolt: Hopefully the car manufacturers will learn from this and put a kill switch on the cars to automatically turn the engine off after an hour or so if the car if is just idling (ie. nobody put the car into gear, turned lights on or off, or even played with the radio). You can even add a button inside the car that can be pressed to override this (in case there is a legitimate need)
Cackalacka
@Lit3Bolt:
Yeah, one of the speculations is, it may have been started via remote, but it may have been a lack of turning the ‘off’ button.
It is easy to leave a car idling if it is a silent hybrid. As everyone who has ever left a car with the lights on will tell you, it is pretty easy to leave a car making a beeping sound without noticing.
As handy as a keyless start car is, nothing is more practical than the fail-safe of a physical key, attached to other keys you will need to unlock the house door. All the computational over-rides are rendered moot with a thin piece of metal.
New Yorker
change reminds of my crazy wingnut uncle who attacks me for various things that I don’t believe because Rush Limbaugh told him that’s what lib’ruls believe.
change, can you point out where someone on this blog celebrates radical Islam as some sort of misunderstood liberation struggle against white oppression?
RalfW
@BGinCHI: I’m not going to check every comment in the thread, but if this hasn’t been said yet, here’s the deal. CO poisoning really, really f*cks with your ability to reason. Lots of people die in homes with otherwise working CO detectors that the user disabled, probably after the CO poisoning started.
change
@New Yorker:
Michael Moore compared the Baathist and Islamic thugs in Iraq to the minutemen.
change
Ward Churchill said he wishes for “1,000 Mogadishus, 1,000 Fallujahs”.
WereBear
I remember a terrible accident on Long Island on winter; the husband started the car in the _closed_ garage, went back in the house, fell asleep on the couch.
Later that morning, when no one had shown up anywhere, they found them where they slept; husband, wife, 3 kids and the dog. Wiped out.
By all means get one and listen to it!
Zuzu's Petals
Just checked the battery on mine. Whew.
New Yorker
@change:
@change:
Wow, Michael Moore and Ward Churchill post at Balloon Juice? I didn’t know that. Let me guess: “DougJ” is actually Churchill and “Tim F” is really Moore.
change
@New Yorker:
They’re “progressives”, aren’t they?
chopper
@change:
reagan called the mujahadeen “freedom fighters”.
New Yorker
@change:
What does that have to do with anything? I asked you to point out someone, even a commenter, at Balloon Juice who has some sort of romantic notion of what radical Islam represents and you counter with…..Ward Churchill. I’m not following you here any more than I was following you with your whole “religion of peace” rant.
Sab
Getting back on the whole alarm topic, here’s a personal experience that still worries me. I grew up in the 80s and home fire safety (smoke detectors, escape plans, etc.) was a topic that was covered fairly thoroughly in gradeschool classes on a regular basis. When I moved in with my girlfriend (now wife) about a year ago, she and her mom (who lived with her) both complained of a strange beeping noise coming from one of the rooms. I investigated, and found out it was a previously installed smoke detector that her mom had removed because she had no idea what it was.
Her mom was from rural Brazil (i.e., a hillbilly) and just didn’t know any better. My girlfriend had a Catholic school education in Philly, so she learned more about praying than practical knowledge about reality. This general ignorance of something that seems so obvious and simple to me was quite worrying to me, because it made me realize there are probably many others ignorant of such a basic home safety measure.
Anyhow, since then I have installed combo smoke/CO detectors in the house (one on each floor) to get it up to “common sense” code.
twiffer
@Lit3Bolt: i’ll bet it was the cat.
Felonious Wench
@New Yorker:
It’s not capable of a response.
I’ll give you a hint, Change. The closest we’ve had is a kid named Matoko Chan (right, guys? That’s the name?) And he got eviscerated regularly, until we got so sick of him he faded into this bleating voice in the wilderness of Balloon Juice, sad, repetitive, yet somehow, part of the scenery. There’s comfort in the familiar.
You’re new, and particularly annoying, so people haven’t settled into their ignoring you pattern yet. Give it time. For now, enjoy your stirrin’ up the libruls fun until the immune system adapts itself to you.
Cackalacka
The topic of this thread is carbon monoxide poisoning.
This is a subject that has killed friends of my family- THIS FUCKING WEAK.
And yet we’ve got a banal dickless bitch troll derail it.
And y’all are feeding him.
If any of y’all think a pathetic character conflating Ward Churchill with your point of view is worth discussing anything with, allow me to remind you this is a thread authored to discuss important safety tips. Tips that might save your life or lives of your loved ones.
Please remember that when you decide whether or not this individual is worth any response, both here and in the future.
Cackalacka
Ha!
Typo (week/weak). Still works.
asiangrrlMN
I had my own scare last weekend. I used almost a whole can of hairspray for my Halloween costume. I shut the bathroom door when I left because I didn’t want the cats breathing the stuff. When I got home, I opened the door and turned on the fan. My CO detector started beeping yellow (meaning, alert. Not, get the hell out of the house), so I opened all the windows and kept the fan running. Yes, I pulled out the detector but only because I wasn’t going to bed any time soon, and it was scaring my cats. An hour later, I plugged the monitor back in, and everything was fine.
So, yes. CO detectors are important.
Larkspur
I live in an apartment complex. A couple of years ago, I heard a sound that might have been an alarm – frankly, I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t in my apartment, and it wasn’t stopping. So I went walking around to investigate, and encountered a couple of neighbors who were wondering what that weird sound was. No smoke, no flames, just this insistent alarm. I kept following it till it got louder and eventually I ran into another neighbor who was carrying a smoldering wastebasket out to extinguish it. His roommate had been smoking.
The point is that not one single one of us called the fire department, and I was the only one who kept looking till I found out what was going on. You get lulled into some kind of “so far, so good” attitude. Boy, would our faces have been red if our neighbor had died of smoke inhalation or something.
‘Course, then there was the house-sitting/critter-sitting job I had over one Christmas. Terrible wind and rain storms, trees down, power outages, and at one point the smoke alarm went on, for like 10 minutes at a time, then it would stop, then go on again. (No fire, no smoke.) It wasn’t one of the battery operated kind, either. The dogs and cats and I would cower, it was so freakin loud. Finally I had to bash it out of the ceiling till it stopped. But I was very very careful about the stove and candles and stuff for the rest of my stay.