Smoke Alarm

How the Stove Almost Killed Me

The following was written about an apartment building in southwest Harlem where I lived for 22 years. It is an edited version of a message I posted on Facebook in October 2020. Since then I have moved to a different apartment in Harlem.

Last night my smoke alarm saved my life.

I was watching TV. Around 8 pm, more than an hour after I cooked and ate dinner, my smoke alarm began going off and yelling in its robot voice "Warning!! Carbon Monoxide!!" Within a few minutes it also began saying "Fire!! Fire!!" although there was no fire.

I called 911, opened the windows and turned on my window fan. Within a few minutes the fire department arrived and verified that there was carbon monoxide in my apartment. The stove was the suspect and they turned off the gas. The air returned to normal which the fire department verified, although I kept two windows open all night long.

The fire department said that they communicated with Con Edison, and they told me that some people from Con Ed would be coming buy to test my stove, but Con Ed never showed up. Con Ed probably decided that since the fire department took care of the problem, they didn't need to do anything. I wouldn't want them to turn the stove back on anyway, since I don't trust it anymore. The stove is at least 18 1/2 years old (the length of time I have lived in my Harlem apartment).

This was a frightening experience and it has never happened to me before, but I am okay. Today I communicated with my landlord who will order a new stove for my apartment.

In the meantime, I am completely unable to cook anything or even heat water for coffee/tea, although I cook 99% of my own meals every day, especially during the pandemic. (I don't have a microwave oven at this time). Since March I have not gone to restaurants or bars. Mostly I have shopped at supermarkets, then cooked food at home.

As a result, I am now buying all of my food outside my apartment. I will also be exploring food delivery apps which I didn't need before. Of course, this will require me to interact much more often with other people during a time when I have been a dedicated mask wearer and practiced social distancing.

But if not for the smoke alarm, I might have died if I couldn't figure out the cause of any carbon monoxide poisoning symptoms I would have developed before it was too late. I bought a new smoke and carbon monoxide alarm in 2018 from Home Depot to replace the one installed in my kitchen by my landlord. The old one was not functioning correctly and it was at least 16 years old.

I don't want to be morbid, but in the worst case scenario, my friends and relatives, with whom I do not communicate every single day (my family does not live in NYC) would have eventually wondered why I was not responding to periodic texts or phone calls. It would have taken days before anyone would have figured out that something serious was wrong and then contacted my lawyer in NYC who has keys to my apartment and who is the Executor of My Estate.

I won't go into too many details, but I know what happens. My older brother, a retired Austin, Texas police officer, died alone in 2010 in his home on a half-acre plot in suburban Austin, and he was not discovered right away. Unlike me, he had refused communications with any relative for most of the prior decade. His neighbors became concerned that they hadn't seen him driving his truck for a long while, and they knew he had been sick. They called the police to do a wellness check on him, something I had also done in the past to make sure he was okay. When the police found him, they called me, since I was the only contact person in their files. I flew down to Austin after calling my younger brother and other family members.

If anyone of you reads this and gets this far, I urge you to check and test your smoke/carbon monoxide detector to ensure that it is functioning and has working batteries. I used to take mine for granted. It would sometimes annoy me by going off for no reason just because I cooked something that gave off a little smoke. But I have always known that they were extremely important. Last night proved their crucial value to me. It saved my life.