Poison Fumes Send 10 to Hospital

Ten members of an Oxnard family, including a 3-day-old boy, were stricken by carbon monoxide fumes in their home early Tuesday, but they apparently escaped serious injury.

All were doing well after receiving pure oxygen in the hyperbaric chamber at St. John’s Pleasant Valley Hospital in Camarillo, said a hospital spokeswoman. They were to be released later in the day.

Fire officials said the family apparently had improperly converted the attic and an attached garage of their Bogota Court home into sleeping quarters. They blamed a poorly connected water heater in the garage and a blocked forced-air heating vent in the attic for pumping colorless, odorless carbon monoxide throughout the house.

Oxnard Fire Capt. Kevin Schroepfer called the family “extremely lucky,” saying their close call illustrates how things can go dramatically wrong when home modifications are made without permits.

“This is a lesson,” he said.

Schroepfer said family members, who could not be reached for comment, will be allowed to return home but cannot sleep in the attic or garage without approval from city code enforcement officials.

Sitting in a tidy neighborhood of homes that sell in the mid-$300,000s, the three-bedroom house was decorated with snowflakes and Christmas lights in the outline of reindeer. Fire and hospital officials declined to release the victims’ names.

At St. John’s Pleasant Valley, Dr. Thomas Millington said this was the third year in a row that he and his staff have treated carbon monoxide victims during the holiday season.

“It happens as soon as it gets cold and someone turns the furnace on,” he said.

“Sometimes it happens when it starts to rain and people put tarps over heating outlets on the roof.”

Also used for treating burn victims and divers with the bends, the hospital’s hyperbaric chamber is big enough for an adult and a child. By inhaling oxygen in a pressurized environment, patients have toxins washed from their cells more quickly than in standard oxygen treatments.

The first two patients from the Bogota Court home Tuesday were a teenage mother and her 3-day-old son.

“We wanted to pop them in as soon as possible,” Millington said. “He napped and nursed and was looking great.”

The family evidently had been breathing the fumes for about 12 hours. They woke about 5 a.m. with severe headaches and a carbon monoxide alarm in the house going off, Millington said.

Three or four hopped into a car and drove to St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard. The remainder were initially treated at the house and taken to the Camarillo facility by Oxnard firefighters.

Millington said the hyperbaric treatments take two hours, with patients usually watching TV to pass the time.

He told family members he wanted them to return for follow-up sessions in the chamber today.

Carbon monoxide poisoning causes about 5,000 deaths and 20,000 injuries annually in the United States. It is the leading cause of accidental poisoning fatalities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.