This American Life and Carbon Monoxide

, Wednesday, December 3


What do these have in common? Well, I was listening to the Home Alone episode of This American Life  and the beginning was a ghost story explaining the crazy things that happened to this family in their new home. Turns out it wasn't a ghost in their house at all but rather they were being poisoned by carbon monoxide from their old heater which was causing neurological damage and making them hallucinate. 

I didn't know anything about carbon monoxide detectors and this story freaked me out so I went out and got one right away. That night when we turned on our ancient heater and the detector went off. The next day the Gas Company came out and saw that the fire box in our heater was cracked and had apparently been that way for a long time, since the crack was rusted. He reported it as extremely hazardous and said not to turn it on. WOAH!  

So anyway, I felt pretty dumb to not have known about all this in the first place, and have been asking people about it and to my surprise alot of other people don't know about it either. So, to make a point out of this long story, don't get poisoned, it's super serious, go out and get a detector for your house today.

Thank you Ira Glass!

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