While nearly every motorist has forgotten to remove his or her keys from the ignition at one time or another, the common mistake almost proved to be fatal for an Avondale family after one of its members failed to turn off the engine before exiting the car, authorities said.
"They were actually pretty lucky," said Art Snapp, division chief of the Avondale Fire Department. "It looks like they're all going to be fine, but carbon monoxide can be pretty deadly - so this could have easily gone the other way."
The Sept. 1 mishap occurred sometime before 3 a.m. in the 11100 block of West Olive Drive, Snapp said.
"Somebody drove to the house, pulled their car into the garage, closed the garage door and left the car running," he said. "It wasn't intentional as far as we know."
However, the lack of intention didn't make the situation any less dangerous, he added.
"We got the call sometime around 3 a.m., and when we got to the house it was pretty much filled with CO," Snapp said. "It's a two-story house, and it had measurable levels of CO all the way up in the attic and down to the bottom floor."
Firefighters found a carbon monoxide concentration of 275 parts per million in the home, Snapp said. The maximum acceptable level of the lethal gas is 15 parts per million, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reports.
"It was extremely high," Snapp said. "Considering how late at night it was, they could easily have kept right on sleeping and they never would have known what hit them."
Six of the home's residents - an elderly woman; a 29-year-old man; and four girls, ages 17, 16, 12 and 8 - were taken to the hospital, where they tested negative for carbon monoxide poisoning, Snapp said. They were released just hours later, he added.
A nine-year study conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics reveals that an average of 6,237 people die of carbon monoxide poisoning every year in the U.S. Of those deaths, 1,283 are unintentional - 57 percent of which are attributed to motor vehicle exhaust, the study indicates.
John Machay can be reached by e-mail at jmachay@westvalleyview.com.
