Alas, what went down this weekend other than almost 10 hours logged between Friday night and last night at close to midnight grading a copy paper box filled to the brim with papers?
How about this around 11 pm on Saturday night?
Did you guess "is that a fire truck?"
Why yes, you would be right. Our carbon monoxide detector went off just before 11 pm waking Bill and causing me to drop a stack of papers I was working on and race upstairs in a panic. We hesitated calling when we could not find evidence of a problem other than at some point of the day our monitor recorded a level of 12 and not the expected 0.
I mentioned calling the non-emergency number for our town. Does YOUR town have a 24/7 "let's not call 911, but this is important in the moment number?" If unsure, check it out and put it in your phone.
The town offered to sent a truck and fire crew to our house and they appeared quickly (and smelled like a fire that one fire department member said they had fought earlier in the evening.) For the next hour, the crew spread out among our house including the attic and under the house in the crawlspace taking carbon monoxide readings. I checked on the boys, who were fine and sleeping peacefully.
They could find no reason why our detector had measured a 12 (over 70 is dangerous) and assured us that no detectable amounts were found. Ben and Ian slept through the whole event so I took a picture to prove that a real, live fire truck had not only been on our street, but firemen had been in our house. I lamented to one of the men, that it is a 4 and 8 year old boy's dream come true to see a real fireman in action and sadly they missed all the action.
One of the firemen returned to the truck and produced a couple of the plastic hats they give out at community events. Can we say once again I was not only impressed with their service, overall attitude to answer questions, but that they genuinely cared about our family.
Ben woke up to go to the bathroom just as the truck was leaving. I said to him in his very sleepy state, "go look out the window to see something really cool." My idea backfired as he was then scared to go back to sleep thinking that his house was going to burn down. I let him sleep with me and he did finally go back to sleep only to have Ian join us with growing pains a few hours later. Needless to say Ian thought Ben (and I) were pulling his leg when we showed him the hat in the morning.
Thankfully this was only a false alarm and I cannot say enough positive things about our local department that keep us safe.
1 comment:
We had ours go off once and was coming from our water heater. Luckily, we got it turned off and a new one! This was several years ago when I had first moved into this house. What a night!
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