GREENSBORO, N.C. — Three people went to a Bahamas resort for vacation and didn't come back home alive. They went to sleep and didn't wake up the next day due to carbon monoxide poisoning.
A $20 device could have saved them. In fact, I travel with my
carbon monoxide detector, right in my suitcase. Carbon monoxide is odorless, tasteless, and colorless, so without a detector, you may not know you're being poisoned until it's too late.
That's what happened to two adults and an 11-year-old boy here in North Carolina. In 2013, they were staying at Boone hotel.
Investigators say an equipment malfunction forced carbon monoxide from that hotel pool heater back into their rooms. At the time, carbon monoxide detectors weren't required in every room.
Due to those deaths, as of 2016, North Carolina requires carbon monoxide alarms in every sleeping room in a hotel, but that doesn’t quite tell the whole story.
The law only includes rooms adjacent to fuel sources and inspectors can only check unoccupied rooms to make sure the alarms are there. So, it's not 100%.
Whenever you travel, to a hotel, beach house, or resort, you don't know if there's a carbon monoxide detector to protect you unless you bring it with you.
According to the CDC: The most common symptoms of CO poisoning are headache, dizziness, weakness, upset stomach, vomiting, chest pain, and confusion. CO symptoms are often described as “flu-like.” If you breathe in a lot of CO it can make you pass out or kill you. People who are sleeping or drunk can die from CO poisoning before they have symptoms.