The St. Marys Fire Department and the Hawkins-Gignac Foundation could be indirectly saving a few more lives after Tuesday’s donation of 50 carbon monoxide alarms.
Part of the foundation’s ongoing campaign to raise awareness about the importance of these alarms, the donation will allow local firefighters to get more of the provincially mandated devices into homes.
During the presentation, John Gignac, the foundation’s executive director, highlighted the difference that having a working CO alarm can make.
“It’s very easy for me to be passionate about it. . . . It’s going to save your life and it’s proven (to work),” Gignac said.
Gignac founded his Brantford-based foundation in June 2009, six months after his niece, OPP Const. Laurie Hawkins, her husband Richard and their children, Cassandra and Jordan, died from carbon monoxide poisoning due to a blocked gas fireplace vent. The family did not have a CO detector in their home.
“When it happened, nobody knew anything about carbon monoxide, and I started thinking, ‘what the heck, nobody knows anything.’ I started up lecturing,” said Gignac, who formerly worked as a firefighter for 34 years.
Since then, Gignac has visited roughly 150 fire halls across Canada while the foundation, which has 11 full-time workers and 30 volunteers, has donated more than 30,000 detectors.
The St. Marys donation comes shortly after Ontario enacted new legislation in January that requires every storey of existing homes that have fuel-burning appliances to have a CO detector. These appliances include furnaces, water heaters and stoves that use natural gas, propane, oil or wood. Previous legislation had only required CO detectors near sleeping areas.
This revised legislation also applies to any storey of a home with a fireplace or an attached garage. These alarms must be installed next to bedrooms; however, even levels that do not have bedrooms must have detectors if they meet the requirements. In owner-occupied homes, the homeowner is responsible for installation. For rentals, landlords have that responsibility.
For Gignac, these changes simply mean a household will receive more notifications if there is a high level of carbon monoxide in the home.
“The more notification you get, the better you are,” he said. “Your body always has carbon monoxide in your system all the time. So if you’re walking outside, you’ve got probably five or six parts per million in your body. The more you’re exposed to, the higher the level goes. You start off with a bit in your system, and it climbs rapidly,” he said.
Despite the dangers posed by carbon monoxide, which has been dubbed the “silent killer” because the deadly gas is odourless and colourless, many people don’t realize the risks, St. Marys fire Chief Phil West said. They also don’t know about the legislative changes, he added.
“Landlords are still unaware. Tenants aren’t aware, and some homeowners aren’t aware,” West said.
For St. Marys residents who are in need of a detector, the department will loan them out until the homeowner can purchase devices of their own.
According to numbers from the Ontario Association of Fire Chiefs, an average of 11 Ontarians die every year from carbon monoxide poisoning.
“It’s very sad to me when I hear that it’s a mother and a five year old that passed away from carbon monoxide, and all they had to do was have a detector,” Gignac said.