For years, Melissa Matthews did not talk about the death of her brother, Tony. But, a decade on, she is finally able to look back on the day that he was found dead, aged 33, at his flat in Harlow, Essex. “I got back from school and then just after dinner there was a phone call to say the emergency services were outside Tony’s flat,” she says.
It turned out that Tony had come home from an evening out with friends and put some bread under the grill, forgotten about it and gone to bed. His grill was faulty and carbon monoxide built up in the flat. Tony never woke up.
“It’s so hard to explain what a hole it has left,” says Matthews, 23. “It still hurts like yesterday.What’s particularly painful is that something as small as a carbon monoxide alarm would have meant my brother would still be here today.”
While every homeowner now knows the importance of having a working smoke alarm, a survey of 2,000 adults, released today as part of a campaign to highlight the dangers of this poisonous gas, has found that eight out of ten of us do not have an audible carbon monoxide detector.
Kirstie Allsopp, the television presenter, is backing the Carbon Monoxide — Be Alarmed! campaign. “For me, the idea of having something in your house, where you should be safest, that can kill you is an awful thought.”
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Allsopp adds that the campaign launch is timely, with many people cranking up their boilers to combat the cold weather and students, a particularly high-risk group, returning to university and putting pressure on their heating systems.
“I’m a believer in no red tape so I don’t want another regulation. Just get your boiler checked, sweep your chimney, and get an alarm. Don’t put all your time and energy into your home and let yourself down on this one thing.”
She urges every homeowner to buy an alarm that makes a sound, rather than the colour-changing carbon monoxide fridge magnet detectors.
Carbon monoxide is produced by fuel-burning appliances such as boilers, stoves and fires, and is colourless, tasteless and odourless. When it is breathed in, it mixes with haemoglobin in the bloodstream and causes blood vessels to become “leaky”, which can lead to swelling in the brain. If there are high levels in the air, a person may begin to lose balance, vision and memory and lose consciousness within an hour. The results can include brain damage and death, with children and the elderly most vulnerable.
For Matthews, the number of people who fail to protect themselves and their families is terrifying. “I’ve just bought a house and I asked the owners when they last had their boiler checked,” she says. “They said they’d never had it done. I wanted to scream. They had a little girl.”
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Gwyneth Erhabor has her boiler checked regularly after she came close to losing all three of her children to fumes from it. She found her son, Reuben, then 13, unconscious and mumbling in his bedroom early one morning. She called to her daughters, one of whom collapsed in the hall. Erhabor then began to feel light-headed, and was too weak to lift her children out of the house. Fortunately, a milkman and neighbour helped to drag the children to safety. The family recovered in hospital.
“My son came round in the ambulance after they put him on oxygen,” Erhabor, 50, recalls, her voice still shaking with fear and emotion today. “He looked up at me and said: “What’s happened, Mum?”
She has struggled to sleep ever since, haunted by flashbacks.
The aim of Erhabor and Matthews is for every family to take the simple steps to protect themselves from this “silent killer”. Carbon monoxide alarms cost just £15 from DIY stores.
“The last thing I said to my brother was ‘see you later’,” says Matthews. “If one person reads this and buys one, we will have achieved something. I want to feel that he hasn’t died for nothing.”
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www.co-bealarmed.co.uk