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One Elgin gas leak victim still hospitalized-Discussion

The title of the story (http://www.fireengineering.com/index/articles/Wire_News_Display/135...) is very misleading.

It was not a gas leak, but an incident involving the use of machinery with internal combustion engines in an enclosed space. It would be like running your car inside the garage with the doors closed.

Lucky someone didn't die.

As part of my job, I conduct forklift safety training to forklift operators. We use ELECTRIC powered forklifts indoors and not LP gas forklifts. The reason is fossil fuel creates carbon monoxide.

The management team of this company needs to be held accountable. Very stupid decision not to use appropriate equipment for the job.

Once, I used a gas monitor on an LP gas forklift at the exhaust to measure CO. I got a ready at the exhaust pipe of 1800 ppm of CO. The alarm level on the detector for CO was 50 ppm. What does that tell you.

This was no gas leak. It was a bad decision.

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Permalink Reply by rob aiers on April 18, 2011 at 10:40am

Hi Art, we come across this type of idiocy all of the time. We recently had a case of a school where kids were being poisoned by CO from dumper trucks operating in a basement right next to a class room where kids were at school. 100 kids were affected. We are launching a news letter to EMS personnel to alert people of the dangers of CO, if we get enough members and I believe we will we are going to run online training for fire fighters and other EMS people about the dangers. We will also be informing of new regulations, we have been helping Illinois house of representatives to get a bill through for CO detectors near garages. I would be glad to hear from you if you think this may be of interest. www.carbonmonoxidekills.com - rob@carbonmonoxidekills.com

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