N.C. woman smoking while hooked up to oxygen is killed when tank explodes
By Theresa Braine
New York Daily News
December 3, 2019
A 61-year-old North Carolina woman was killed Tuesday when her oxygen tank exploded.
The Zebulon, N.C., woman had been smoking a cigarette while hooked up to the tank, the Nash County Sheriff’s Office told WRAL-TV.
Her husband called 911 to report the resulting fire, authorities told WRAL. Zebulon is about 25 miles east of Raleigh.
While death by oxygen tank explosion is relatively rare given the number of tanks in use today, experts agree that smoking near one ups the odds enormously. Most news reports of exploding oxygen tanks involve cigarettes.
“Most instances involve the regulators and not the oxygen cylinders,” according to EMS1, an online resource for paramedics. “Contamination in and around the regulators, or the regulators themselves are catching fire. Due to the presence of oxygen, the fires burn very quickly and appear explosive.”
A person dies every four days in a fire involving home oxygen equipment, according to HME Business, an online trade journal covering the home health products industry.
Citing a study by BPR Medical Gas Control, a vendor of gas products for medicinal use, HME Business said that between December 2017 and August 2019 there were 311 incidents, 164 of them fatal. Most of those killed were the home oxygen patients, but 11 third parties also lost their lives, the study said. The National Fire Protection Association puts the total at about 70 people per year.
“We’ve always suspected that the true scale of the risk from home oxygen fires in the U.S. was higher than previously estimated,” Richard Radford, managing director of BPR Medical, told HME Business. “This data not only confirms the extent of fatalities among home oxygen users themselves, but also the impact on other people, including neighbors, family members, and the emergency services.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s amazing how stupid some people can be. When smoking has forced them to be on oxygen, they still continue to smoke.
1 comment:
I used to have to sleep on oxygen when I had Sleep Apnea. My wife hated it because we could not use an electric blanket due to fire danger.
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