Harsh Weather, Hard Times Boost Monoxide Deaths : Hazards: Many victims are immigrants unaccustomed to well-sealed U.S. housing and unfamiliar with the danger of burning fuels in enclosed spaces.

It was time to pay the rent at the Canyon City Econolodge, and the manager of the down at the heels hotel in Azusa knocked on Thomas Wayre’s room one rainy afternoon last week.

“Tom! Tom!” Thakor Bhakta shouted to Wayre, who had lived for two weeks in a $90-a-week room with no central heating. No answer.

When Bhakta opened the door with his passkey, he found the 48-year-old unemployed man lying motionless on his side. Next to him on the floor was a foil roasting pan, positioned on a ceramic toilet tank lid, with the ashen remains of a charcoal fire.

Paramedics declared Wayre dead at the scene, the latest in a rash of asphyxiation cases involving unsafe heaters.

Rain and bone-chilling weather have combined with hard times in Southern California to kill at least six people in heating-related asphyxiations in the last month.

“These cases follow certain patterns,” said Capt. Eugene McCarthy, paramedic coordinator for the Los Angeles Fire Department. “They follow the weather and they follow poverty.”

Heating problems are as much a part of being poor as stingy food rations and broken-down cars, emergency service workers say. “You have people seeking shelter and warmth in any way they can,” McCarthy said.

When charcoal is burned in an enclosed room, the accumulation of carbon monoxide can smother people as effectively as a pillow pressed against their faces. Unvented heaters that burn kerosene or propane have the same effect.

In December, a 32-year-old Chino woman and her two children died when, after cooking carnitas on a barbecue grill, she carried the grill into their home to keep them warm on a chilly night. The mother apparently was trying to cut her $100-a-month heating bill, police said.

The next morning, Chino police found the bodies of Maria Gonzalez, 6-year-old Ernesto and 5-year-old Eliana snuggled together in a queen-size bed.

Two weeks later, police found Jesus R. Romero, 53, and Juanita Ortiz, 62, dead in a one-room squatter’s shack east of Lancaster. They had warmed the shack, which did not have gas or electricity, with an unvented propane room heater.

“Every year there are notices about the folly of doing this,” Azusa Police Chief Byron Nelson said, “yet people keep doing it.”

On Tuesday, luck was with members of Hean Kim’s family, who built a charcoal fire in a hibachi to warm their Long Beach living room.

According to family members, they had grilled some meat on the hibachi Monday evening and then, as they were preparing to go to bed, Kim poured fresh charcoal on the fire. The household’s wall heater had not worked all winter and the hibachi was providing a welcome glow to the little house, family members said later.

About 3 a.m., Kim’s wife, Sing Khuth, woke up with dizziness and chest pains. Thinking that she was having a heart attack, she called to her husband and four sons. Unable to rouse them, Khuth reached a bedside telephone and called her son-in-law, who lived down the street.

The son-in-law, Nate Ngouen, realized something was seriously wrong and he came running.

Tearing open the doors and windows, Ngouen was able to awaken everyone but 12-year-old Houeth Kim, whom he found unconscious on the kitchen floor. Paramedics from the Long Beach Fire Department took the boy to Long Beach Community Hospital. He was treated and released several hours later.

Ngouen’s quick action probably saved the entire family, which had immigrated from Cambodia six years ago, Fire Department spokesman Bob Caldon said. “There was a good chance that no one would have woken up,” he said.

Like the Kim family, carbon monoxide victims are often immigrants who are unaccustomed to well-sealed U.S. housing and unfamiliar with the consequences of burning fuels in enclosed spaces.

“At home (in Cambodia), you can burn stuff in the house, but there are holes in the bamboo where the air comes in,” Ngouen said Wednesday. “Here, when you close the door and the windows, nothing escapes.”

Odorless and colorless, carbon monoxide flows into the body’s circulatory system, adhering to the hemoglobin in blood cells, preventing them from absorbing the oxygen needed to sustain life.

“It has one hell of an affinity for the hemoglobin,” said Manny Schweid, director of housing and institutional programs for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. “When it bonds that way, the body gets no oxygen and you’ve got asphyxiation.”

Charcoal packages display warnings about burning the briquettes indoors. But McCarthy said the problem is serious enough to warrant something more extreme. “Maybe it should be shown prominently, in bright Day-Glo letters,” he said.

But even vented heaters in the nicest housing, when improperly maintained, can produce carbon monoxide, said Bob Cunningham, an expert on heating devices for the Southern California Gas Co. Carbon monoxide can seep into a house if dust is allowed to block the air circulation and if rust from inside the heater falls into the flame. “What you often find is a failure to do housekeeping,” Cunningham said.

Allowing fumes from a heater’s flame to mingle with air circulating through a house, usually because a fan compartment is not properly sealed, can also produce the deadly gas.

“We probably have 30 cases of carbon monoxide poisonings reported to us every year,” said Dick Friend, a spokesman for the Gas Co., which serves 4.5 million customers in 11 counties. “Not all of them are fatal.” Most are reported by those who use the gas company’s free trouble-shooting service for faulty heaters or gas appliances.

Anyone who suspects that a heater is not working properly should immediately call the Gas Co., which will send a technician for a free investigation.

Azusa police are still baffled by Wayre’s death. According to the hotel’s owner, Wayre had declined the offer of an electric space heater in his room.

A spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office said Wednesday that an exact cause of death had not been determined.