A review of carbon monoxide incident information for the 2006/07 period has revealed that deaths as a result of carbon monoxide produced by a gas appliance are at the lowest levels since recording began in 1996/97.
The report, written by Advantica and funded by The CORGI Trust, was commissioned as a continuation of the work established during the Joint Industry Programme (JIP) addressing gas related carbon monoxide issues, within the Incident Data project area.
The aim of the report is to identify common causes of carbon monoxide incidents related to appliance and system design, installation and maintenance. This information can then be used to further improve customer safety, to target expenditure on carbon monoxide incident prevention and to identify further research work.
The report provides records of the number and severity of causalities for 29 separate incidents, including five that were fatal, occurring during 2006/07.
Chair of The CORGI Trust Mary Benwell said: “The CORGI Trust is pleased to be funding the production of the report and we believe the information and data -contained within it to be crucial to the further reduction of death or serious injury from carbon monoxide exposure.
“Although the number of deaths through carbon monoxide from natural gas and LPG are down when compared with statistics from the previous reports, this doesn’t mean that we as an industry can begin to be complacent about this issue.
“What we need to concentrate on is the number of people who are poisoned from carbon monoxide but go undetected – if we could determine the true number of people in this category, I’m sure it would make for alarming reading”.
Detailed analysis of the fully reported 14 incident properties and their appliances shows the following:
Eleven of the 14 incidents were owner occupied, and 11 incidents were houses, six of them being terraced properties
Casualty locations were mainly living rooms or bedrooms, but there were three in kitchens and three in halls
Appliance locations were split; eight in rooms, six in compartments
The central heating appliance concerned in the most serious incident was, or should have been, room sealed. There were also ten open flued central heating appliances, one radiant/convector fire and two cookers
The main appliance faults involved flueing, ventilation and lack of servicing
For further information on The CORGI Trust visit: www.trustcorgi.com/about/trust.