Six Kids Were Asleep Above Our Garage on Halloween Night. A Tragedy Was Minutes Away, Until a Small AirGuard Monitor Caught It.

A mother on the night her daughter's sleepover nearly became the worst night of six families' lives, why the alarm on her wall never made a sound, and the small monitor at the top of the stairs that saw it coming.

By David Lawson, Home Safety Editor

As told by Dana Whitfield, Pennsylvania · Reader account, names and details changed · 7 min read

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Halloween is my husband's holiday. Last year it was the night six children fell asleep in the room over our garage, and a firefighter told me how many minutes we had left.

Every October, Rob turns our front yard into the scariest house on the street. Fog machines, a strobe-lit graveyard, a twelve-foot skeleton that turns its head when you walk past. Kids come from three neighborhoods over. Last year he added so many fog machines that the porch outlet kept tripping, so he borrowed his brother's portable generator.

Our daughter Maddie had turned ten that week, so we said yes to a sleepover. Five of her friends, sleeping bags in the bonus room over the garage, scary movies after trick-or-treating. Our six-year-old, Owen, begged to stay up with the big girls.

Around 7:30 it started to rain. Rob didn't want the generator getting wet, so he rolled it just inside the garage and left the big door open about a foot "so it could breathe." I want to be honest about this part: I watched him do it and didn't say a word. It looked careful. It looked responsible.

By nine the girls were upstairs in pajamas. Two of them said they had headaches. One threw up in the bathroom. Owen fell asleep on the bonus room floor, still in his dinosaur costume. Every one of those things had a perfectly good explanation: too much candy, too much excitement, a long night. That is what carbon monoxide does on Halloween. It hands you a whole bag of excuses.

9:47 PM

The number at the top of the stairs

I went up with a bucket and a towel. At the top of the stairs I passed the little monitor we had plugged into the hallway outlet the winter before. I had walked past it a thousand times. It had read 0 every single time.

It said 58.

I stood there holding the bucket and watched it turn to 59.

I didn't know what 58 meant. I knew it had never been anything but zero, I knew it was going up, and I knew there were six children twenty feet behind that door. That was enough.

I flipped on the lights. Two of the girls didn't stir. I had to shake Maddie's friend Ava by the shoulders and say her name three times before she opened her eyes. I picked Owen up off the floor and he didn't wake up. Not a sound, his dinosaur tail dragging down the stairs behind us. I screamed for Rob to shut off the generator. Then I called 911 from the front lawn with six kids in sleeping bags around me in the rain.

10:06 PM

What the firefighter's meter said

The engine was there in about nine minutes. The first firefighter through the door had a handheld meter clipped to his jacket. He walked the house room by room while we huddled on the neighbors' porch, then came back and read the numbers off the screen.

Then he pointed at the carbon monoxide alarm on the wall of our downstairs hallway. Green light on. It hadn't made a sound all night.

"Where's the alarm in the room over the garage?" he asked. There wasn't one. "There almost never is," he said.

"Your alarm isn't broken. It's doing exactly what it was built to do. That's the problem."

I didn't understand what he meant. So he explained it, standing on my neighbor's porch in the rain, and I have not looked at that alarm the same way since.

10:20 PM

What the paramedics found

While he talked, three ambulance crews were working through the kids with a fingertip sensor that reads how much carbon monoxide is bound to your blood. They call it a CO-oximeter. Healthy is under two or three percent.

Rob, who had been outside all night, read 3. I read 6. Maddie read 10. Ava read 12. Owen, who had fallen asleep on the floor right above the generator, read 13.

The paramedic said they transport anyone over ten. Then she said the thing I still hear at night: children breathe faster than adults and take it in faster, and the ones who were already asleep would not have woken up on their own. Not by midnight. Maybe not at all.

Three of the children went to the hospital. I had to call two other mothers at 10:30 on Halloween night and tell them their daughters were in an ambulance because of something in my house. I have never made a harder phone call in my life than the first one. Everyone was on oxygen until almost three in the morning. Everyone came home.

The part nobody tells you

Your alarm is allowed to wait. For hours.

Almost every carbon monoxide alarm sold in the United States is built to the same national safety standard. It is the line on the box that makes you feel protected. And it does not say what you would assume it says.

The standard is written to avoid false alarms, so it requires alarms to stay silent at low levels. Below 30 parts per million, an alarm is required not to sound at all, for weeks on end. At 70 ppm, the level where adults start getting headaches, an alarm is permitted to wait anywhere from 60 minutes to 4 hours before making a sound. It only has to react quickly at levels that are already an emergency.

Read that again with our house in mind. Our downstairs alarm was sitting in 24 ppm, a level it is required to ignore. The bonus room, where six children were asleep at 71 ppm, had no alarm at all. And even if it had, at that level a standard alarm is allowed to stay quiet for up to four hours.

The generator had a full tank. It would have run until three in the morning.

What would have happened

The morning we didn't have

"How long was that generator going to run?" the firefighter asked Rob.

"Until it ran out," Rob said. "I was going to leave the yard lit for the late trick-or-treaters and go to bed."

The firefighter nodded like he had heard it before. Then he said this, and I am writing it down as close to word for word as I can:

"Then I'd have been at this address at seven in the morning instead of ten at night. Six kids asleep in a closed room over a running generator. Their parents would have been pulling into your driveway to pick them up for pancakes."

"I've seen how that morning goes," he said. "Every fall. After every storm. It's always a generator in a garage with the door cracked open, and it's always a family that thought they were being careful."

Six children. Five of them weren't mine. A closed door, a green light, and a generator with a full tank.

He told me three things I have repeated to every parent I know since:

• Never run a generator in a garage, even with the door open. A foot of open door does nothing. A small generator can fill a garage with deadly levels of carbon monoxide in minutes. Generators belong outside, at least 20 feet from the house, with the exhaust pointed away from windows and doors.
• Rooms over an attached garage get it first. Carbon monoxide seeps up through the ceiling, around ductwork, and through the door into the house. Bonus rooms, playrooms, and bedrooms over garages are exactly where kids end up sleeping.
• The test button tests the horn, not the sensor. Pressing it proves the alarm can make noise. It says nothing about whether the sensor can still detect gas, or whether the alarm is anywhere near the room that matters.

"Your wall alarm did what it was built to do," he said. "It was built to scream when things are already bad, in the hallway it's hanging in. The thing at the top of your stairs showed you a number while things were still getting bad. That's why six kids are standing on your neighbor's porch."

The next morning

Five families asked the same question

By eight the next morning I had a text from every one of the other parents. Not one of them was angry, which I still can't quite believe. Every one of them asked the same thing: what was the thing in your hallway?

Three of those families have one in their kids' rooms now. Ava's dad told me he ordered his from the hospital waiting room at two in the morning, because it was the only thing he could think of to do.

What's in our hallways now

A number in every room that matters

We did not throw away the wall alarm. The firefighter was clear about that, and so is every fire department: keep a certified alarm on every level. It is the device built to wake you up when levels are dangerous, and nothing here replaces it.

The generator lives twenty-five feet from the house now, under a canopy, with the exhaust facing the street. Rob built the stand himself. He doesn't talk about that night much, but he checks that stand every time it rains.

And we added the thing that saved us, in the rooms where it matters. The monitor at the top of the stairs is an AirGuard plug-in air monitor. Here is what it does, without any of the salesmanship:

• Shows a live carbon monoxide reading from 0 ppm. Not a light. A number, updated continuously, that you read as you walk past.
• Detects natural gas as well. Two sensors in one unit, which matters near a furnace, a water heater, or a gas range.
• Shows the temperature too. Useful in a kids' room, a basement, or anywhere you already keep an eye on it.
• Plugs into any standard outlet. No ladder, no wiring, no battery to forget. Setup took me less time than reading this sentence.
• One-touch self-test. Checks the unit is working whenever you want the reassurance.

We have one in the bonus room now, one at the top of the stairs, one in the kitchen, and one in the basement by the furnace. They all read 0. Every time I walk past the one outside the bonus room, I look. I cannot tell you how much that single glance is worth.

One more thing

Three weeks later it said 6

I want to end with the small version of this story, because the small version is the one that will actually happen to you.

The first cold morning in November, the furnace kicked on for the first time since spring. An hour later the basement unit read 6. Not 58. Six. A wall alarm would not react to 6 in a month of Sundays, and a year earlier, neither would I.

We called a technician. A bird had built a nest in the furnace flue over the summer and it was partly blocked. Forty minutes and a ladder later, the display was back to 0.

That is the whole point. Not the night with the fire engine and the ambulances. The quiet Tuesday morning where a number told us something was slightly off, and we fixed it before it was anything at all.

A light tells you nothing until it's almost too late. A number tells you what's happening now. On Halloween night, that difference was measured in minutes.

See what a standard alarm can't show you.

AirGuard plugs in and shows live carbon monoxide and gas readings from 0 ppm. Set up in under a minute. Available in multi-packs for every level of your home.

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