1 dead, 4 transported to hospital for CO poisoning

MEADOW LAKES — Two adults and a child living in a residence on South Krysten Circle, and the two men who discovered them, suffered severe carbon monoxide poisoning Thursday morning.

West Lakes Fire Chief Bill Gamble said two adults who lived there — Joseph Hubbard, 28 and Angela Hubbard, 24, — suffered the most.

Angela Hubbard died as a result of CO poisoning and Joseph Hubbard was transported to the hospital by air ambulance in critical condition. He was later transported to Seattle for further treatment.

Three others — including their daughter and two people who found them unconscious — also were transported to the hospital, but were not in critical condition. Alaska State Troopers said in a press release that the girl was “conscious and functional” when they arrived.

“The young female did not have toxic amounts (of carbon monoxide) in her bloodstream, but she had enough that we were concerned enough to send her to the hospital,” Gamble said.

He said the girl and woman were in the bed in the master bedroom. The male was in the bathroom.

“The child actually was in bed with them, but it looked like she had slept in her room and had her door closed and then at some point in the morning came in and laid with them,” Gamble said in explaining the differences in the carbon monoxide levels. “We’re really lucky because with that tiny body they cannot absorb that much CO.”

The girl and two other people were sent to Mat-Su Regional Medical Center. The man in critical condition was airlifted to Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage.

Alaska State Troopers spokesman Tim DeSpain said emergency personnel responded to the residence around 9 a.m., Nov. 7.

When crews entered the utility room of the home, carbon monoxide levels read at 1,000 parts per million, Gamble said.

“We’re sure that it was a CO poisoning issue,” he said of the four hospitalized patients and one fatality. “We’re not sure of the cause.”

He said the fire department owns sophisticated equipment that can pinpoint a source of carbon monoxide and he has his suspicions of what that source was. But when a fatality is involved, he said it’s best to allow that determination be made by the State Fire Marshal’s office. An investigator from that office was on the way as Gamble spoke Thursday morning. He said it’s up to that office to make and announce the official determination.

Gamble said the home had neither stand-alone CO detectors nor a combination smoke/CO detector.

In addition to a Mat-Su Borough paramedic, three ambulances, a West Lakes fire engine and a handful of fire department SUVs, two Alaska State Troopers and Enstar Natural Gas Co. responded to the scene.

Publicly available carbon monoxide exposure charts list 35 parts per million as the point at which prolonged exposure will start to cause headaches after six to eight hours. At 200 parts per million, that raises to a “loss of judgment.” At 400 parts per million, two hours will cause a frontal headache. Double that, at 800 ppm, two hours will cause a person to pass out.

Gamble said that when crews arrived at the home, CO readers in their hands read at 100 ppm and kept climbing. They didn’t enter the home. He said the two people who’d found the family weren’t happy.

“They were a bit upset because our folks didn’t just run in there, but we don’t do that,” Gamble said. Instead, they put on masks and air tanks.

Gamble urges people to take the time to make sure their furnaces, water heaters and anything else indoors that burns fuel — be it natural gas or fuel oil or wood — is in working order.

The fall is typically a busy time of year for fire departments as homeowners start firing up their stoves and furnaces after the warm summer months.

“It’s that time of year now, the temperatures are starting to drop,” Gamble said.

Asked for advice when it comes to CO detectors, Central Mat-Su Fire Department Assistant Chief Michael Keenan said that first of all, people should know how to tell the difference between a detector running low on battery power and one that is actually sending out a warning. Either in the manual that came with it or on the back of the alarm should be instructions.

“On the back it should tell you how many beeps are an alarm how many beeps are a malfunction,” he said.

If it’s an actual alarm, he said, call 911 and leave the house. Don’t do anything to mitigate the CO.

“A lot of people want to open windows and ventilate. Well, if you do that, when we show up with our CO detectors we’re not going to find anything,” Keenan said.

The department is usually able to find the source of the CO.

It’s then up to the homeowner to get it fixed. Keenan said that if you’re a renter, it’s up to you to get your landlord to fix it, unless you live in a large apartment complex.

“It’s not really anything that we have authority over,” he said. “If we get into big multi-stories our fire code officials can do a little bit there.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.