Gary Coles’ Story

Colorless, Odorless, Explosive…and Very Deadly

By Gary Coles

It was early January, 1969 and Grand Forks, North Dakota was cold, really cold! And it had been like this for more than two long weeks. Days and days and days of daytime temperatures of 10 below zero, or less, and nighttime temperatures of 25 below, or less, were unusual even for North Dakota. Why, because extreme cold spells tended to last only three to five days…that’s about as long as a winter time meteorological bubble of high pressure would linger invisibly above the featureless snow-covered white and frigid prairie.

I had returned to Grand Forks from Christmas New Year’s break. I came back early because I needed to study and to work on research projects. It was my third year in grad school and I was renting the second-floor master bedroom in the home of an elderly widow who lived on South Chestnut Street. Mrs. S. had also rented a second bedroom that was just down the hall from mine. Fez was also a doctoral student, a man in his mid-to-late 40s whose last name was Fezler, aka “Fez.” When I arrived in Grand Forks after the break Fez had not yet returned from Minneapolis where his wife and children lived and where he planned to return after earning his PhD in education. The next morning I awoke early and went out for breakfast at the Donut Hole on South Washington Street. I did not linger there because I had a bad headache and felt very tired. As the day went on I began to feel even worse. I tried to study but didn’t feel good enough to do even that. In late afternoon I decided to go out for pizza, come home, take a bath and then go to bed early and “sleep it off.” Pizza, really? At the time, nothing dampened my interest in pizza, especially with Italian sausage. As I was scraping off the thick frost on the windshield of my car, Fez drives up. He, too, had decided to return early before the beginning of the semester and to get a head start on his studies. He didn’t want to join me for pizza probably because he was more health conscious than I.

Fez was an interesting guy. He was a high school teacher who had decided to complete a doctoral degree so he would be more qualified academically to be the superintendent of a school district. He also worked as a referee for high school football and basketball games and, by his own admission, could run for hours and, most importantly, keep up with student athletes. I was jealous. My energy came from being 25 years younger than Fez.

I ate at my favorite pizza restaurant and returned home exhausted. After resting for a while on the top of my bed I took a hot bath which felt really good, given the sub-zero temperatures outside. I almost went to sleep in the tub but got out because it was Fez’s turn for a hot, relaxing bath, after his hard day of studying and driving to Grand Forks from the Twin Cities. I seemed to be getting more and more tired with each passing minute so concluded it was time for me turn out the light and sleep off whatever was bothering me. While I was preparing to do just that I recalled hearing or reading some health care person advising people who lived alone to tell someone about their symptoms if they were sick. Might save your life, they said.

With that in mind I got out of bed, walked a few feet down the hall and stood in the doorway of Fez’s room. He was in bed in his pajamas, reading, about to turn out the light. I told him I was ill and so much so that I didn’t think I could stand there long enough to tell him how I felt. So, I asked “can you please come down to my room so I can tell you about how I feel?” I got back to my bedroom and lay on top of my bed and Fez soon got to my room, and stood in the doorway, his back against the door. My face was flushed and hot, I felt really spaced out and dizzy, I had an intense headache, and I was panting and having great difficulty catching my breath. For some reason that I do not recall I checked my heart rate and it was almost 200 beats per minute. But, I was able to breathlessly share my symptoms with Fez. After about minute, all of a sudden Fez grabbed his chest, slid down the door and sat on the floor. “Gary, my heart” he moaned. I recall my exact thoughts from more than 50 years ago, and here they are. “Oh shit, I’m sicker than a dog and this old guy’s having a heart attack!”

We just looked at each other for a bit, Fez sitting against the opened door and me lying on my bed. Luckily, I didn’t lose consciousness and Fez didn’t drop dead. After a minute or two Fez, a wiser man than I, said “Gary, do you suppose the house is filled with carbon monoxide…my heart is racing and I can’t catch my breath too.

What do we do, I thought, then repeated it out loud? Fez replied “it’s caused by gas furnaces and gas water heaters, so we should probably call the gas company. Let’s go downstairs and ask Mrs. S if we can borrow her phone.” So we did, surprising Mrs. S who was dressed in a housecoat and getting ready for bed too. So, at this point, all of us were wearing our pajamas and robes and about to “sleep it off.”

The gas company told us that they would send out someone right away and that we should go outside and wait, being very careful not to switch anything on or off because carbon monoxide can easily explode given even the smallest spark. Dressed in pajamas and going outside was not realistic because by this time in the evening the outdoor temperature was at least 20 below zero with a little bit of wind making the cold feel even colder. Fez called the gas company again about five minutes later to find out what was keeping the service man. He shared our plight with the gas company person who answered the phone and he advised us “to open the windows, being sure not to make any sparks or turn on the radio or use any light switches.” We were in Mrs. S’s living room because her only telephone was there. We walked over to a standard sized double-hung living room window that was fogged up. We could see it was frozen shut. The storm window also was frozen shut with enough ice that trying to open it was not likely to be successful. In fact it had been so cold for so long that every window in the house was frozen shut.

So, we did the only thing that was do-able. We opened both the front and back doors, and propped the storm doors open as well. A light breeze went through the house that was very cold. We each retrieved a heavy quilt from our respective closets and sat cross-legged on the floor in the living room trying to keep warm. After 20+ minutes no gas company repairman appeared so Fez said, “I’m going to call the fire department.” They got to the house in less than 90 seconds! The fire chief came in and talked to us while one of the two firemen with him got a ladder from the truck and climbed onto the roof to check the furnace’s chimney. Another fireman went down in the basement to check the furnace and water heater. They also put face masks on us and hitched each of us up to an oxygen bottle…with instructions to breathe slowly and deeply. Didn’t do much. All three of us were dizzy, had headaches, were out of breath and glad to be sitting. A few minutes later the fireman on the roof came into the house and reported to the fire chief that the chimney was completely plugged by a three foot piece of ice. He said he had removed it. The second fireman came up from the basement and told us that the furnace exhaust had not been vented according to code and that it looks like whoever did the work was an amateur.

Let me digress. Turns out an amateur, Mrs. S’s late husband, did do the work. Some time back he had added a new second-floor room during the summer when the furnace was not being used. Because the new room was directly above the furnace, he elected to re-route the furnace’s exhaust in the basement and connected it to the home’s existing ceramic fireplace chimney. The fireplace chimney was 10+ feet from the furnace. So, he ran the exhaust coming out of the top of the furnace horizontally under the ceiling of the unfinished basement over to the fireplace chimney. Apparently, he did not know building codes because gas furnace exhausts were mandated to go straight up from the furnace and out through the roof so they would not freeze up during the winter. Gas furnace exhaust contains a lot of water vapor.

The bottom line is that the S’s furnace exhaust would have cooled down a bit by the time it even got to the ceramic chimney in the basement. This meant that the exhaust flowing up the ceramic chimney was not sufficiently hot to ensure that water would not condense and freeze in the chimney itself higher up. Moreover, according to the fireman who removed the ice plug, the ceramic chimney had some cracks in it just under the roof line and that’s where the ice accumulated. The prolonged extremely cold weather, the re-routing of the furnace exhaust, and the condition of the ceramic material in the fireplace chimney was the perfect recipe for disaster. And that happened in January, 1969.

That said, Mr. S’s “fix” had worked for a while. He had died some years back and Mrs. S had lived in the house since then with no apparent ill effects. But the winter of 1969 was just toooooo cold! But back to 1969. The gas company repairman finally arrived and Mrs. S made an appointment for the next day to correct the furnace exhaust problem so that it conformed to city codes. The fire chief assured us that the house would be safe overnight now that the ice plug had been removed. About then the ambulance arrived and we were taken to Grand Forks Hospital.

I told the ER doctor about what happened and he told me that recovering from carbon monoxide poisoning would take a long time because carbon monoxide is more soluble in blood than oxygen. It would just take some time for my body to get rid of it. “You’ll be out of breath even with minor exertion…for example you’ll probably need to rest a couple of times going down and especially up stairs…and you’ll have bad headaches for a while too.” Like right now I thought. He continued “you’re young, you’ll get through this.” The doctor sent me on my way with the following statement “another 30 minutes in that house and I would not have seen you here, I would have seen you in the morgue!”

A recent photo of Gary Coles (photo courtesy of Gary Coles)

Jenkins Foundation: Wow, that is quite a story! Thank you for sharing. So glad it had a happy ending for all three of you! Amazing Mrs. S had had no ill effects prior to that. How long did it take for your symptoms to go away? Did you end up with any long term effects? What prompted you to write your story after all these years?

Gary Coles: I wrote it for a writer’s group I’m in. And, I remember details of my life really well, especially things like this. All of us didn’t seem to have any lasting effects. But who knows. It took us a few months to regain our breathing. Fez had the greatest effect since he couldn’t run like the wind for several months. I think we recovered ok because we weren’t exposed to CO for a long time. If I were doing a movie I can envision the ice in the chimney building up then suddenly plugging up. Mrs S was downstairs so probably got less CO. But I’m just guessing.